I suppose it is a ‘good thing’ that some (if not all) of the culprits involved in the murder of Stephen Lawrence in Eltham, have been finally brought to book.

Mrs. Lawrence was very quick to criticise the police following the jury’s guilty verdict yesterday, and I reckon that she is completely right here, the police should have brought these thugs to trial, found them guilty and gaoled them at the time.

However, I am not that enamoured by the manner in which this verdict has been achieved, and I reckon that the far reaching implications of this ‘trial’ are very dangerous for liberty and justice in England.

First, if one can, can we please dispense with the ‘racist’ tag which has been used relentlessly by the media in regard to both the perpetrators and the police. Murder is murder, and if anything the police’s inability to bring a convincing prosecution at the time, says more about their incompetence than their ‘institutional’ racism. There were then, and are now, plenty of cases of murder that are badly investigated and fail to achieve a conviction, or even come to court, the racist bit is surely a bit of a red herring, even if it was part of the motivation behind the crime.

Anyway, here is my real problem, this is one of the first prominent cases where a defendant has had to defend himself twice on the same charge. Since Magna Carta, Englishmen have been free to go about their business following a successful defence of a case brought against them in court, unless of course they admit guilt unilaterally at a subsequent time. Prior to the “Criminal Justice Act 2003″ there was a concept called double jeopardy, which meant that once tried for a crime, one could not be tried again for the same crime.

OK, occasionally there might be a guilty man amongst us, but the idea makes a lot of sense. Firstly, it ‘should’ ensure that the prosecuting authorities, take great pains to do their jobs and prepare their case with due diligence. Secondly, it should mean that a suspect will not be pursued by the authorities for the rest of their life.

I must say that I am a bit surprised that more ‘constitution/magna carta’ bloggers have not covered this corruption of our rights.

N.B. There is an excellent well researched report and history of this case which has recently appeared by Ms. Anna Raccoon here, I recommend it.

Yesterday was a tumultuous day for me.

I had been fasting for two days in preparation for a medical examination, my Crohn’s disease is causing me problems again, and I have been told that I am in need of more surgery… Downer. Anyway, I am not feeling too bad at the moment, so I will hold off as long as possible.

Following this procedure, I decided to go ahead with a long term plan to attend a concert by the fantastic Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

I had been really looking forward to this and I thought that I might have to miss it, I am glad I didn’t, they are sublime.

The amazing Gillian Welch & David Rawlings.

In case anyone does not know what they are about, they are “old timey” bluegrass style country singers, who combine original songs with traditional and occasionally (as last night) hippie anthems. Generally though, their output is centred on hard times and depression in the USA.

Anyway, at the end of the first set, who should we see making his way out for a smoke but our “Great Leader”… One thing for sure, he wasn’t outside with the rest of us hoi-polloi…

DC caught in the lights like a lamped rabbit... (Note also in the check shirt in front, Robyn Hitchcock.)_

Here is a nice tune by Robyn Hitchcock accompanied by Gillian Welch & David Rawlings…

Robyn Hitchcock with Gillian Welch & David Rawlings

A question occurred to me this morning, is Mr. Cameron deliberately engineering the enslavement of our people in the EU nightmare in some vain hope that we might start producing musicians of this calibre here? I can’t see anything like this coming out of X Factor m’self! Oh and while we are at it, I wonder whether David Cameron was listening when David Rawlings did a rousing rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”?

Anyway, thanks to my sister for taking me to see this, after such an ordurous start to the day.

There is only one party that supports immediate withdrawal of the UK from the EU….

UKIP

But not only does it support and advocate this, it also supports and advocates the next logical step which is….

(Swiss style) Direct Democracy

That is not the brand of democracy that Daniel Hannan is campaigning for…

Oh No…

Voting for hundreds of troughers to represent the people is a pointless exercise, they always end up supporting their paymasters rather than their voters.

The 111 MP’s that voted against the LibLabCON yesterday made no sacrifice. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them hadn’t been instructed by the whips to vote as they did….

Gotta show a token (losing) vote, otherwise the “democratic” HOC would look like a soviet vote, or one of those general elections that Sadaam used to hold.

Of course, the honest thing for that 111 to do, would have been for them to announce immediately after the division, that they were joining UKIP.

The Labour vote was designed to embarass Cameron, if one looks at the Labour people that supported the motion, they are all genuine lefties (with the exception of the oleaginous Vaz). If Labour had voted for the proposal the CONservatives would have been comprehensively defeated, they wouldn’t have just embarrassed Cameron, they might have actually triggered this faux referendum…. and that would never do.

The reality of “our relationship” with the EU is that we are not in a “relationship” we are owned by the EU, just as our legs are joined at the hip to our bodies. The acquis communautaire decrees that we accept the EU (warts and all) AS IS…

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TAKING BACK POWERS.

So the theatre that we witnessed yesterday, with the UKIP outside and the LibLabCON inside the HOC, is not much more than a sideshow. The most vitally important part of this whole democracy thing, is NOT that we withdraw from the fascist European Union (although that is important)…

Rather, it is that we the people win the right to trigger a genuine referendum either locally or nationally ON ANY issue, AND that the petitioners’ question is what is presented…

NOT some theatrical, moronic and downright criminal compromise, as presented in the HOC yesterday.

There was an interesting TV programme last night… One hour on the problem of rubbish (er… recycling) in the UK. For a whole hour, the programme berated us ordinary folk, for making a mess, they bashed the local authorities for dereliction of duty, for not tidying up after ourselves, they empathised with the poor overseas, who had to sort out our mismanaged rubbish by hand. But never once did they address the real villains of the piece…

Not once, did they mention the unholy alliance between big business and government, or fascism as Mussolini described it. From the beginning of the industrial revolution, when the towns first started to become urban (or overcrowded), we have had a problem with rubbish.

Of course in the early days, we did not have so much of the stuff, we were less materialistic (we weren’t fashionable), but we still had clothes and we still had some food waste, bottles and old clay pipes and pots… Oh and we didn’t have the benefit of the EU, to regulate what we did with our junk.

So we did what came naturally, we burnt as much as we could and got some heat energy out of it, what was left was dust, which the “dustman” collected, we sold most of our bottles and jars back to the manufacturer, we ate everything and gave the bones to the dog, we tossed our old tobacco pipes into the river. Nothing was left.

Fast forward to the recent past, government decided that pea-soupers were to be avoided, so it banned the burning of rubbish along with polluting coal… in fact we just moved that pollution out of sight, we actually started to burn more coal on the hilltops and waste the energy that it produced by sending it along energy sapping cables… and we created energy giants and massive bureaucracies to administer and police us.

Our local councils started to tax the individual small businessman out of existence… the economies of scale… we saw the emergence of supermarkets and high street (later retail park) giants. Their accountants destroyed the labour market, by pre-packing everything and replacing skilled people with “shelf fillers”, we told people to trust the “sell by” labels, everything came in its own plastic container, we started to generate rubbish on the grand scale, and we couldn’t get rid of it.

Where once we would go to the butcher and buy some meat, wrapped in paper, we now bought meat in nice, clean individually crafted plastic trays. Where once we bought a bottle of milk, drank it and washed the bottle and gave it back to the milkman, we bought plastic bottles of the stuff and threw the bottle and half of the milk away, instead of making junket/yoghurt, butter or cooking with it… it wasn’t unusable, it was just a bit sour… and so on, for clothes, for under-engineered household machines, tools and implements.

All of this was done with the blessing of the central government and their chums in big business… it was good business after all!

And not once, did that TV programme mention the organisations that were making our lives impossible and morphing us all into idiots, that do not understand when something is or isn’t beyond repair, broken, worn out, inedible…. Not once did they point the finger at who exactly was responsible for the mountain of plastic that fills our bins.

Oh no, those folks were being encouraged to become even more fascist, even more vigilant in regard to the stupid folk that just want to feed and clothe themselves. It is after all, another rich seam of income for them… fines for not recycling, contracts for various inefficient recycling efforts, opportunities for burning heavy oil for shipping waste from one place to another, including overseas. Oh, and don’t forget, this mountain of waste plastic is made from oil too.

This is just one example of how unregulated, we can sort out our own lives… Regulated we are forced to delegate that to a higher authority to profit and generally f**k us over in exchange for an opportunity to go on fact finding missions to Bali and celebrate their cleverness at banquets.

There are many more… In fact, every facet of human life is/can be regulated to the point of stupidity and turned into a business opportunity by these fascists, and then of course, policed.

How’s this for an idea… Suppose we went to the supermarket, bought whatever food we think we need, and then unwrapped all of those plastic trays, took off all of the extraneous wrapping and put the actual food into paper bags and carried it home… made our own yoghurt from waste milk, gave our really off meat to the dog/cat… generate only dust and leave the fascists to sort out the junk that we leave behind.

That, of course, is pre-supposing that our shopping basket doesn’t consist only of part/pre cooked meals… There is no hope there!

Of course one could also avoid the supermarkets altogether and try to find a butcher, baker and candlestick maker that will behave responsibly, give better service and sell better produce.

Oh no, that would never work.

Reading the BBC (so-called) coverage of the UKIP conference in Eastbourne made me wonder whether they were actually there.

See this report by Ross Hawkins who I sat next to briefly, whilst I had a cigarette.

This report goes through the usual BBC ritual of attempting to show that UKIP is deeply divided, even though there is scant evidence… Every political party has factions and frictions and UKIP is not alone.

However, the BBC when it ever bothers to mention the UK’s fourth largest political party, spends most of its effort highlighting this aspect.

Despite the BBC’s efforts here are the FACTS:

When Nigel Farage leads the party, they make huge advances in popularity despite the fact that he also has a bit of a Marmite™ effect on some people, however there is scant evidence of a lack of support for his leadership.

UKIP is NOT a “one trick pony”, but it is the only party to consistently point out that despite its full manifesto at every election it has fought in, that the effect of our membership of the EU ensures that most policy is effectively without teeth.

The recent (shall we say) difficulties for those members of the (deeply political rather than pragmatic) Euro and its illegal bailouts, coupled with the BBC’s misrepresentation of the facts, are starting to have an effect on British minds, along with their pockets.

That despite the Brussels funded BBC’s best efforts to hide this, UKIP is not alone amongst the EU member states to have a very strong antagonism to the dictatorial EU. There were speakers in the hall that are leading the fight against it from the Netherlands, from Finland (20% of the popular vote, up from 4%), and from France. There will never be a unified opposition, because rightly, these parties are interested first in representing the views of their own electorates, and long may that be so.

There is no such thing as being “in Europe, but not run by Europe”, members either submit to the bureaucratic dictatorship, or they leave. Consequently, the current “government”, is guilty of misleading the British people in tandem with the BBC and the MSM (excluding the Daily Express), and this is a titanic hurdle that the likes of UKIP have to clear.

Jon Gaunt, who made a rousing speech at the conference, pointed out that even though there were lots of organisations in the UK, that campaign against our continuing membership of the EU, including his recently renamed campaign “UK out of the EU”, that actually joining UKIP was not compulsory, and indeed had positive implications in the battle to get out of the EU.

Finally, the reality is, that the only sensible direction for the people of the UK, is to head resolutely for the EXIT sign, and UKIP is the ONLY nationwide party that is advocating this!

Unlike mine, there are some fine political blogs in the UK, I list my favourites on my blogroll, and no doubt there are many more.

Richard North at EUReferendum is my personal favourite, he seems to hit the bullseye most of the time and he is very active.

However, there is one thing that I find difficult to comprehend, they all ignore the fourth largest political party in the UK, the only party that is dedicated to our withdrawal from the EU, namely the United Kingdom Independence Party, which is akin to our government’s (until very recently) policy of claiming that they are actually a government. Recently they are seen to be regularly deferring to their masters, and bending over backwards to avoid any confrontation with them… Beats me why?

The “Elephant in the Room” paradigm works both ways though…

Our government is actually in Brussels, it is known as the European Commission and is not elected democratically (it’s not even elected undemocratically, its members emerge through a process of soviet style horse-trading), and my favourite bloggers routinely ignore the UKIP (for one reason or another)…

I think that they miss a trick, if they don’t like the leadership, they can actually change it, UKIP IS democratic. Moreover, the same could be said for the many Eurosceptics in the CONservative Party, who really demonstrate their “plastic” credentials every time they utter or print a word.

The UKIP conference begins today in Eastbourne, and there are some fine speakers there. I recommend UKIP as our only sane chance at getting us out of the soviet style dictatorship that the rest of our politicians/newspapers and MSM find so beguiling.

Following is my response to one of today’s stories in the Daily Telegraph:

There is a single word that sums up the problem of speed cameras (and their ilk)….

RESPONSIBILITY!

Motorists earn their licence by proving to a trained examiner, that they are able to use the roads responsibly…

This does NOT mean sticking rigidly to some arbitrary speed limit, it means that he/she takes into account the conditions, such as the weather, the quality of the road surface, the amount of traffic and so on.

With the introduction of these speed camera devices, much of this was effectively jettisoned, and many drivers spend more of their time studying their speedometer and making sure that they will not trigger one of these odious devices, by constantly travelling at 5 or 10 MPH less than the prescribed limit… They have lost the art of taking responsibility for their own actions!

Their introduction also excuses the authorities to reduce the amount of properly trained police officers in exchange for revenue raisers, in a further abandonment of their responsibility.

In the same way that the maintenance of a welfare state has created a culture of dependency, so the introduction of these infernal machines has created a culture of “not me guv” drivers. Mind you, I am not blaming these drivers, some of them lose their livelihoods by failing to concentrate on needless hazards as opposed to general road-craft.

With the massive amounts of income derived from the road licence fee and the various taxes on fuel, the responsible (ha ha) authorities should be building more and bigger roads, with better surfaces and better signage, and ensuring that there are enough well trained coppers (or some such) to improve our already comparatively very safe infrastructure.

After all, our population has been expanding relentlessly since the “blessed Margaret” abandoned the long term policy of building more roads to make room for more vehicles of every type… For instance, where do cyclists, public transport and road hauliers operate? In amongst everyone else… stupid!

As someone pointed out to me today, in recent years, we have collectively witnessed the death of common sense in exchange for common purpose, and we are all the more impoverished for it.

I have just had a chance encounter with our illustrious mayor… Of course, I managed to get a picture of him with his head down catching flies, but that’s cricket, I ‘spose.

Further… If I had been quick-witted and bolshy enough, I would have liked to have said a few things… For instance:

“Oi Boris, why don’t you grow a pair and act like a proper conservative (small c)? Here you are in Lewisham, bastion of the 1950′s Caribbean immigrant, those who came to live the British dream and better themselves… And what did they get? The European nightmare!

So please, just think about what it is to be a British conservative, rather than being a good European.”

Yeah… I would have said all that, but I reckon Boris would have walked off to save himself from falling asleep… never mind, that’s what this blog is for!

Each government and its associated PM (particularly since WW2) have had a hand in this and one wonders sometimes whether those conspiracy theories have any traction.

There was the first post WW2 government of Attlee with his own ideas and the implicit support of Liberals and (to a lesser extent) Tory’s… aka the Beveridge consensus… “Something must be done for the poor”…

Of course Attlee’s implementation peppered with lefty Bevanism led to the whole mish-mash in the first place… and all in five glorious years, they wasted the American loans negotiated by the other Bevin and set up the Welfare state.

Then what follow are the Eden/MacMillan years, where it became obvious that not only was British power at an end, but MacMillan was going to “birch” himself and the nation by doing whatever our former colonies demanded in defeat…. There was absolutely no need to give British passports to the citizens of these new “independent” nations.

Then followed the Wislon years with the faux tory “the traitor Heath” in opposition, who was looking to prostrate the nation to Germany and France, which became a reality once Wislon had spent all the money and made America less of a friend than previously… the general political consensus was that as a defeated empire we should help create and join another.

Then followed Thatcher, who made an enemy within… “the white working class” and turned our defence “forces” into “services”.

This led to the disaster that was the treacherous Major/Blair/Brown years, where corporate business was cuddled up to and where it could do whatever it liked to the already alienated “white working class”, destroying or exporting manufacturing, taxing everything and replacing it with more services… public service, financial service and service service… selling hamburgers to each other, because over taxation makes it impossible to compete in manufacturing, despite having some of the best homegrown ideas.

And here we are, with a police “service” and an alienated common people infused with foreign cultures, in particular the Jamaican street culture and its patois being something that the yoof aspire to.

The response needs to be the triumph of the people over the government, these people need to demand their misspent money back… We need to rely on ourselves alone, through free trade and exchange of the best ideas.

The welfare state needs to be examined and re-imagined as the farewell state, the white working classes need to realise that there is no such thing as a free lunch… Because, in exchange for it, we get a culture of dependence, which inevitably leads to a police state.

We need to get back all of the natural benefits that accrue from being an island nation, self reliance, independence and pride in our difference, our language and our white working classes that did so much to defend the British way, right up until our government betrayed it.

Some say that we need a “Bill Bratton”, I reckon we need more than that, we need a “Ron Paul”. We need a politician who will dare to concentrate on government’s core competence of defence of the realm from without and from within.

I have been a bit quiet for the last week… I have been busy messing my computer up, and I have just come to a decision.

I am going to re-install the old OS to my computer, it used to run on something called OSX 10.6 aka “Snow Leopard”, but I made a rash decision and “upgraded” to OSX 10.7 aka “Lion”…

I have been using computers professionally since 1974, so it is not as though I am new to this game, indeed I bought my first Apple computer because Microsoft introduced “Vista”… Until very recently, I was very happy with my choice, but I now reckon that Apple have made the same mistake that MS made with Vista.

The biggest error, is the idea, that changes should be effected just for the sake of them, even if they do try to demonstrate how innovative these “new ways” are!