Tag: European Union

RSPB: We Must Build More Bird-Chopping Eco Crucifixes!

PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty
Britain must build thousands more bat-chomping bird-slicing eco crucifixes in order to stave off “dangerous climate change” says the RSPB.

RSPB stands for Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and, no, this is not The Onion.

Yes, Britain’s oldest and biggest ornithological society really has put out a report demanding the erection of yet more avian Cuisinarts – despite swathes of evidence showing that these monstrosities are responsible for killing many millions of birds around the world every year.

Its rationale:

The way that we currently use energy in the UK is not sustainable. We use too much of it, we use it inefficiently, and our main sources of energy, fossil fuels, are driving us towards dangerous levels of climate change – one of the greatest long-term threats to wildlife.

In order to save Britain’s wildlife from the alleged threat of climate change, in other words, we’ve got to first got to slice and dice it with the turbine blades that, by some estimates, kill 22 million birds a year.

Britain currently has around 5,000 wind turbines. According to the RSPB, it could do with around 20,000 more. More solar panels too. And wave power. And carbon capture and storage. And herds of organic unicorn to harvest all waste and pollution and magically transform it to special fairy energy which can be sprinkled on the cots of every new born child so as to instil in it a true appreciation of Mother Gaia’s beauty. (I may have invented the last one)

Mysteriously no mention is made of the actual cost of this exercise.

We’re shown a triangle at the beginning which illustrates our ‘energy trilemma’ – Environmental Sustainability; Energy Security; and Affordability.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Brexit: Mark Carney can **** right off back to Canada

Frank Augstein – WPA Pool/Getty
Mark Carney was imported from his native Canada to become Britain’s Bank of England governor on an £874,000 salary for one reason and one reason only: to serve as the creature of Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.

George Osborne has decided to stake his political future on Britain voting to remain a member of the European Union.

So naturally, his Dobby the Maple Leaf House Elf over at the Bank of England felt obliged to serve his master yesterday by declaring – entirely independently, of course, and without prejudice – that if Britain were to vote for Brexit then the sky will fall in, Ringwraiths will stalk the land, men will say openly that Christ and His saints slept and, worst of all, property prices will fall by approximately 318 per cent.

Because maple leaf Dobby is speaking with the authority of his position of Governor of the Bank of England, a lot of people will go: “Well he must know what he’s talking about. He’s Governor of the Bank of England, innit?”

You could make the same specious argument about Goldman Sachs, Christine Lagarde, Jean-Claude Juncker, President Obama, Prime Minister David Cameron, the Confederation of British Industry, the European Commission…

Like Carney, they’re all for the European Union because they’re all part of the Establishment elite in whose interests it is run. As Martin Durkin argues cogently in the must-see Brexit the Movie – watch it here – that’s what the forthcoming EU referendum is really about: the battle between a remote, anti-democratic elite and us the people.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Belgian Terror Attacks: Only ‘Brexit’ Can Save Britain from This Scourge of Political Islam Waging War in Europe

HATIM KAGHAT/AFP/Getty

At least 34 people are dead and many more injured as a result of the latest Islamist terrorist atrocity in Europe – in Brussels, this time.

But apparently – so the left-liberal tastemakers assure us – it is too early to make political capital out of this.

I’m afraid I disagree. The time to make political capital out of atrocities like this is precisely when the bodies are still warm and the limbs haven’t been swept up. That’s because – you see this again and again from the Boston bombings to the murder of Lee Rigby to the Charlie Hebdo – our decadent, supine, relativistic, Western liberal culture would dearly love to pretend that these are rare criminal events which we should learn to take in our stride and to which we should not ‘overreact’.

And I personally think the people who have been killed and maimed so cruelly and unfairly deserve better than that.

If their deaths and injuries are to mean anything, then surely the very least we owe the victims is to ask ourselves honestly why this happened and how we can reduce the likelihood of it happening again. Getting squeamish about speaking home truths on grounds of “taste” does not honour these victims. It insults them.

Here is why this morning’s bombings happened: political Islam is at war with the West.

It may suit our complacency to reassure ourselves that we’re not at war with Islam but that’s not going to make any difference to the sundry Jihadist cells now plotting even bigger atrocities all over the world.

They understand perfectly well what’s going on even if we refuse to.

For the basics, read John Ware’s superb profile of the Muslim Brotherhood in Standpoint.

Political Islam has absolutely no interest in finding any accommodations with what it considers to be our worthless Western culture. Its aim is total conquest. To deny this is a bit like reading Mein Kampf and going “Yeah but he doesn’t really mean it.”

This is why, increasingly, immigrant Muslim communities are failing to integrate with their host countries in the West, be they the US and Canada, those in Europe or in Australasia. Even if you believe that practitioners of “soft” Islam are in the majority, the moderates don’t stand a chance against the aggressive proselytising of the fanatical hotheads.

The situation is not unakin to that of Germany around 1933. Up until then, many if not most Germans had found Hitler’s short-trousered, strutting, zealots to be vulgar, unpleasant and not at all where they wanted to be politically. But the aggression and ruthlessness of those zealots overcame all resistance, so that even the moderates who despised them found it easier to endorse them and go with the flow. I’m sure there are lots of lovely Muslim families from Bradford to Molenbeek who’d prefer their daughters to be subject to British and Belgian law rather than the de facto jurisdiction of their local sharia courts. But I’m not sure it’s an option open to them.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Jeremy Clarkson Chops off His Own Balls

Dan Kitwood/Getty

Jeremy Clarkson has just lopped off his privates in public.

It wasn’t an edifying sight.

I’m trying to think of an analogy that captures the enormity of what Clarkson has just done. In terms of sheer cringeworthiness, I suppose it would be that sick but oddly compelling documentary I saw the other night called Dan’s 80lb Testicle, about a man with an unfeasibly large growth on his undercarriage which he had to lumber round the streets of LA using an upside down hoodie.

In terms of pusillanimity, it would be something along the lines of Sir Francis Drake on the bowling green at Plymouth looking down at the Spanish Armada and saying: “You know what, me hearties? Let’s get in our ships, sharpish, and sail off somewhere nice and safe, like the other side of the world. It’s plain as a pikestaff that England is lost.”

In terms of nauseating, oleaginous, social climbing disgustingness it’s like Uriah Heep on his knees ever so ‘umbly presenting a BBC tribute to the late Princess of Wales, filmed at Althorp with  hour long interviews with Earl Spencer and Tony Blair with songs by Sir Elton John performed by the children of Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, entitled “Still Queen of All our Hearts.” On Brown Nose Day.

Really, though, there is no metaphor or image or simile on earth quite dramatic enough to capture the shaming spinelessness, the platitudinous vapidity, the intellectual feebleness, the surrender-the-pass cowardliness of the piece Clarkson wrote yesterday in the Sunday Times “explaining” why, all things considered, he thinks it’s a good idea for Britain to remain in the European Union.

Here is an extract to give you a taste.

Whether I’m sitting in a railway concourse in Brussels or pottering down the canals of southwestern France or hurtling along a motorway in Croatia, I feel way more at home than I do when I’m trying to get something to eat in Dallas or Sacramento. I love Europe, and to me that’s important.

I’m the first to acknowledge that so far the EU hasn’t really worked. We still don’t have standardised electrical sockets, and every member state is still out for itself, not the common good. This is the sort of thing that causes many people to think, “Well, let’s just leave and look after ourselves in future.”

I get that. I really do. And after I’d watched Hannan’s speech, that’s briefly how I felt too. But, actually, isn’t it better to stay in and try to make the damn thing work properly? To create a United States of Europe that functions as well as the United States of America? With one army and one currency and one unifying set of values?

So Jeremy Clarkson’s arguments for Britain remaining in the European Union boil down to two things.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

The EU is to Blame for Britain’s Flood Disaster

JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty

Northern Britain has spent Christmas being inundated with floods of “biblical proportions”.

For green activists like Bill McKibben this is obviously another consequence of man-made climate change.

And the politicians agree – not just left wing ones like Hilary Benn but also notionally conservative ones like local MP Rory Stewart, Environment Secretary Liz Truss and Prime Minister David Cameron. All have suggested that the floods are the result of unprecedented ‘extreme weather events’ whose consequences are quite beyond their control.

Either they are ignorant or lying or buck-passing – or all three.

UK FLOOD

As it was in Somerset in early 2014, so it is with the floods which have ravaged the north of England (and which are fast spreading south) this year. Yes, they are indeed a man-made creation – but the people mainly responsible are the bureaucrats and green activists at the European Union whose legislation has made it illegal for Britain to take the measures necessary to reduce the risk of flooding.

British rivers have always been prone to flooding because Britain is a kingdom of rains (where royalty comes in gangs).

But traditionally, those living in flood-threatened areas have been able to mitigate the problem by making sure that their rivers are well dredged – and thus able to flow freely.

For an excellent historical perspective on this read Philip Walling’s recent piece for the Newcastle Journal, reprinted here by Paul Homewood:

Read the rest at Breitbart.

How Green Activist Scientists Rigged the EU Pesticide Ban Which Has Cost Farmers and Businesses Billions

“‘Victory for bees’ as European Union bans neonicotinoid pesticides blamed for destroying bee population” read a front page headline in the Independent last year.

It was the culmination of an intense burst of campaigning by left-wing pressure groups Avaaz, Change.org, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, BugLife and the Environmental Justice Foundation which erupted from nowhere last year.

One minute, no one had heard of “neonicotinoids”. The next, it suddenly seemed as though everyone knew for certain that this pesticide was responsible for the “colony collapse” devastating the world’s bee populations and that therefore it should be banned by the EU as a matter of urgency.

Among those who lent their weight to the campaign were the fashion designers Vivienne Westwood and Katharine Hamnett, the National Treasure Stephen Fry and dozens of activists charmingly and amusingly dressed in bee costumes. The impression given was that this issue was an absolute no brainer on which the jury of the wise, decent and informed had long since delivered their verdict: anyone who spoke up in favour of these evil chemicals was clearly nothing more than a science-denying bee-hating bastard in the pay of Big Pharma.

So why, almost instantly, did I smell a rat? Well apart from the obvious clue – any campaign involving Vivienne Westwood is, by definition, stupid, silly and wrong – there was also the matter of the unseemly haste with which these campaign groups were trying to force the legislation through. And the fact that the bully-mob tactics being used here were so redolent of the ones I’d seen elsewhere used by environmentalists to justify their scientifically dubious campaigns against everything from the forestry industry to the harmless trace gas carbon dioxide.

Green on the outside, red on the inside: that’s what these Watermelon campaigns are really about. So, with the help of investigative journalist Richard North, I began looking into the true story behind the ban.

What we found was appalling if not altogether surprising. The ban – heavily opposed by Britain’s then-Environment Secretary Owen Paterson – had rather less to do with proven necessity than it did with political horse-trading.

Indeed, the scientific evidence for justifying the ban seemed flimsy to the point of non-existence.

How then, could all these celebrities and campaign groups and environmental activists and EU apparatchiks and progressive media outlets (from the Guardian and the BBC to Huff Po) have been persuaded otherwise? On what kind of science were they basing their claims?

Well, now thanks to a happy internet leak we have our answer. It turns out that the “evidence” was cooked up at the suggestion of a cabal of activist scientists working for a supposedly neutral and independent environmental organisation called the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Read the rest at Breitbart London

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The Establishment’s Attacks on UKIP Are Doomed to Backfire

By “the Establishment” I don’t, of course, mean the toffee-nosed, elitist right-wing conspiracy which exists largely in the perfervid imaginations of Russell Brand and Owen Jones.

I mean the new progressive Establishment which has dominated the cultural and political argument since at least the Blair era: the quangos, the seats of academe, the politically correct corporatists, the Eurocrats, the congenitally bien-pensant luvvies, the liberal media from the Guardian to the BBC, the charities, the identikit politicos in the Westminster bubble. They want to destroy UKIP not out of high principle but simply because it represents such a threat to the communitarian status quo. Here are some examples.

The Electoral Commission

In Standpoint Nigel Vinson tells the full, shocking story of how the Electoral Commission deprived UKIP of two MEP seats in the European elections in May – essentially by rigging the ballot paper.

A hitherto unknown party calling itself An Independence From Europe was allowed by the Electoral Commission onto the top of the ballot paper – and went on to claim nearly a quarter of a million votes from confused people who had almost certainly meant to vote UKIP.

The seats went to Green MEPs instead. At the time UKIP didn’t make a big deal of this, presumably because it didn’t want to sound petulant at a moment when it needed to sound exultant. But what happened here was the most extraordinary miscarriage of justice, perpetrated by a supposedly neutral, independent regulatory body which is clearly riddled with bias and is unfit for purpose.

Stand-up comics (aka The Wankocracy)

In the old days, on the Eighties alternative comedy circuit, all someone like Ben Elton would have to do was mention the words “Margaret Thatcher” – or even just “Thatch!” – for their audience to dissolve in smug, consensual, righteously scornful laughter.

Now this role as the butt of every second-rate lefty comic’s crap jokes has been taken over by UKIP. “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally it means they have not a single political argument left,” Baroness Thatcher once said. As her most plausible current heir, Nigel Farage should find this heartening.

The European Parliament

Last week in Strasbourg, the European parliament’s arch-federalist political establishment rigged the rules and gamed the system in a dirty tricks measure which could almost have destroyed UKIP. Christopher Booker tells the story here:

Ever since Ukip last May won 24 seats, the Parliament’s Euro-elite – led by its German president Martin Schulz, the arch-federalist once famously compared by Silvio Berlusconi to a Nazi concentration camp commandant – has been longing to cut Mr Farage down to size. Last week Mr Schulz thought his moment had come. When an obscure Latvian MEP was persuaded to defect from Farage’s group, it meant that it no longer included representatives of seven countries, the minimum qualification to be recognised as an official parliamentary group.

Mr Schulz triumphantly announced that the group was thus disbanded, which would have been for Mr Farage and his colleagues an utter disaster.

Under new rules introduced by Mr Schulz, not only would they instantly have to vacate their plush offices, losing the services of some 40 administrative staff and £13 million in cash and kind, Mr Farage would also have to retire to the back benches, no longer able to make those speeches at the front of the Parliament that have earned him millions of hits on YouTube, such as that in which he told Herman Van Rompuy that he had “the charisma of a damp rag”.

Scarcely had Mr Schulz exulted at his triumph over the hated Eurosceptics, however, than the group recruited a Polish MEP to make up the numbers again. Despite attempts to discredit this man as a “Holocaust denier”, because his party leader back in Poland once questioned whether Hitler knew about Auschwitz (Farage’s new colleague merely described Hitler as “an evil man”), Mr Schulz soon found himself having to call Farage back to the rostrum as if nothing had happened.

What’s almost as interesting as Schulz’s plot – and how close it came to succeeding – has been the way the story has been reported across the media. Had these dirty tricks been applied to any other mainstream party, the stink would have been enormous.

Instead, even in supposedly conservative newspapers, reports focused not on the monstrousness of Schulz’s wicked, blatantly anti-democratic scheming but on the essentially trivial views of some Polish nobody from a party with whom it was perfectly clear Farage had got into bed out of pure pragmatism rather than deep ideological kinship.

Read the rest at Breitbart London

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