Judicial Review of the corolavirus lockdown in England

Robin Tillbrook is a solicitor and chairman of the English Democrats.  He has launched an application for Judicial Review of the  regime the Government is inflicting on the UK.   Below are the documents of the Judicial Review application’. 

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The Prime Minister

10 Downing Street

London

SW1A 2AA

And the

Secretary of State Health & Social Care

39 Victoria Street

London

SW1H 0EL

Sat, 25 Apr at 20:04

Dear Sirs

English Democrats (1) Robin Tilbrook (2) – v – The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State Health and Social Care

Letter Before Claim
This letter is drafted under the judicial review protocol in section C of the White Book, which normally provides for a response within 14 days, but in view of the importance and urgency of the issues raised a response within 7 days is sought.

1.     Respondents:  The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State Health and Social Care

2.     Applicants: The English Democrats (Reg. No. 6132268) & Robin Tilbrook both of Quires Green, Willingale, Ongar, Essex, CM5 0QP

3.     The details of the Applicant’s legal advisers, if any, dealing with this claim:-

Tilbrook’s Solicitors, of Quires Green, Willingale, Ongar, Essex, CM5 0QP

4.     The details of the matters being challenged:-

The disproportionate inference with English rights and freedoms and the legality of:-

I        Statutory Instrument: 2020 No. 350

Public Health, England

The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England)

Regulations 2020

          Made                   at 1.00 p.m. on 26^th March 2020 

Laid before Parliament    at 2.30 p.m. on 26^th March 2020 

Coming into force            at 1.00 pm. on 26^th March 2020 

The Secretary of State purported to make Regulations in exercise of the powers conferred by sections 45C(1), (3)(c), (4)(d), 45F(2) and 45P of the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984(1).

These Regulations are:-

1.     Contrary to the fundamental constitution of England as set out in Magna Carta and the English Parliamentary Constitutional Convention Declaration of Right of 1689 and its subsequent enactment in the English Bill of Rights 1689.

2.     Contrary to the Common Law of England in that (non-exhaustively) they are:- Ultra Vires; disproportionate and irrational.

3.     Contrary to the European Convention of Human Rights (pursuant to the Human Rights Act).

II       The “Guidance Covid-19: Guidance on Social Distances which inter alia states:-

          “Stay at home

·         Only go outside for food, health reasons or work (but only if you cannot work from home)

·         If you go out, stay 2 metres (6ft) away from other people at all times

·         Wash your hands as soon as you get home

Do not meet others, even friends or family. You can spread the virus even if you don’t have symptoms.”

This is neither proper nor an accurate reflection of the said   Regulations.

III     The Coronavirus Act 2020 is:-

1.     Contrary to the fundamental constitution of England as set out in Magna Carta and the English Parliamentary Constitutional Convention Declaration of Right of 1689 and its subsequent enactment in the English Bill of Rights 1689.

2.     Contrary to the Common Law of England in that (non-exhaustively) they are:- Ultra Vires; disproportionate and irrational.

3.     Contrary to the European Convention of Human Rights (pursuant to the Human Rights Act).

5.     The details of any Interested Parties:-

None have notified as yet, but every person in England has an interest in the issues raised herein.

6.     The Issues:-

The above are a disproportionate and unwarranted interference with English rights and freedoms and human rights.

The Coronavirus Regulations and the European Convention on Human Rights

The lockdown measures imposed by the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations are the some of the most extreme restrictions on fundamental freedoms imposed in the modern era; and are a disproportionate interference with the rights and freedoms protected by the European Convention on Human Rights (‘the Convention’) and therefore unlawful.

In considering their proportionality, the failure to derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights (under Article 15) is a relevant factor, as it might suggest that the public health crisis is not one that threatened the ‘life of the nation’.  Likewise, the failure to use the Civil Contingencies Act is both relevant to question of whether the Regulations could lawfully have been passed under the delegated powers of the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 and to proportionality, given that the CCA requires much more regular Parliamentary scrutiny and has specific limitations on the extent of any regulations passed under its delegated powers;]

The Regulations have grave impact upon a number of rights and freedoms, including at least to family and private life (Article 8), religious practice (Article 9), association and assembly (Article 11), property (Article 1 of Protocol 1) and education (Article 2 of Protocol 1) and probably to liberty (Article 5).  They represent an unprecedented intrusion into the freedoms and livelihood of the public at large and the gravity of this impact is a key consideration in determining whether they are the least restrictive means of tackling, proportionately, the spread of the virus.

Article 2 of the Convention (the right to life) does not impose a positive obligation to impose Draconian restrictions as a public health measure and is limited (in so far is relevant) to imposing positive obligations on states to ensure a functioning criminal justice system and to react proportionately to immediate and individual threats to life.

The means by which proportionality should be judged are the Siracusa Principles, developed and recognised by international law to determine the proportionality of quarantines and measures responding to public health crises.  These require such measures to be:

•             provided for and carried out in accordance with the law;

•             directed toward a legitimate objective of general interest;

•             strictly necessary in a democratic society to achieve the

              objective;

•             the least intrusive and restrictive available to reach the

              objective;

•             based on scientific evidence and neither arbitrary nor

              discriminatory in application; and

•             of limited duration, respectful of human dignity, and

              subject to review.

The five tests for the continuance of the Regulations declared by the First Secretary of State on 16th April, were as follows:

·        That the NHS is able to cope;

·        a “sustained and consistent” fall in the daily death rate;

·        reliable data showing the rate of infection was decreasing to ‘manageable levels’;

·        that the supply of tests and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) could meet future demand; and

·        that the government can be confident that any adjustments would not risk a second peak.

It is submitted that these tests: (a) impose an over-rigorous and unreasonable fetter on the government’s discretion to remove or reduce the restrictions and are wholly incompatible with an application of the Siracusa Principles; (b) would (if applied) retain the restrictions (if, for example, there was not a ‘sustained and consistent’ fall in the death rate) even if an objective evaluation showed that less restrictive measures might have the same object; and (c) fail to require the Secretary of State to have any regard to the impact of the Regulations on the important rights and freedoms they restrict.

An evaluation of the scientific evidence would be unavoidable for any court reviewing the lawfulness and proportionality of the Regulations, as it would otherwise be unable to consider whether the measures were the least restrictive necessary in a democratic society.  This scientific evidence is far more uncertain than is generally accepted and there is, in particular, a great deal of uncertainty about the effectiveness of lockdowns in containing spread, the true mortality and infection rates and the accuracy of the modelling from Imperial College that has been key to government policy.

In conclusion, the application of the Siracusa Principles in a judicial review, taking account of the gravity of the removal of so many and such important rights and freedoms with so little democratic scrutiny, is likely to conclude that the measures are disproportionate to their object, were imposed following an unreasonable fetter on the government’s discretion and are thus unlawful.

7.     The details of the action that the Respondents are required to take:-

a)     To admit that the said Regulations, Guidance and Act should be rescinded and replaced within an agreed timetable.

b)    In accordance with the agreed timetable, to rescind the same and to replace them with agreed Regulations, Guidance and Act which does not improperly interfere with English Rights and Freedoms.

8.     ADR proposals:-

None.

9.     The details of any information sought:-

Not applicable.

10.The details of any documents that are considered relevant and   necessary:-

          Not applicable.

11.The address for reply and service of all documents:-

Tilbrook’s Solicitors of Quires Green, Willingale, Ongar, Essex, CM5 0QP

12. Proposed reply date:-

In view of the urgency and importance of the issues 7 days from the date hereof.

Yours faithfully

 

R C W Tilbrook

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http://robintilbrook.blogspot.com/2020/05/government-response-to-our-lockdown.html

Monday, 4 May 2020

GOVERNMENT RESPONSE TO OUR “LOCKDOWN” CHALLENGE

GOVERNMENT RESPONSE TO OUR “LOCKDOWN” CHALLENGE GOVERNMENT RESPONSE TO OUR “LOCKDOWN” CHALLENGE In a previous Blog article I set out our Pre-action Prot…

GOVERNMENT RESPONSE TO OUR “LOCKDOWN” CHALLENGE

In a previous Blog article I set out our Pre-action Protocol Letter before Claim.  I have now received the Governments letter in reply and I have copied the Government’s response below.

“Dear Sirs

English Democrats and Robin Tilbrook – v – The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State Health and Social Care

We are in receipt of your letter before claim, which we understand to have been sent on 23 April 2020, seeking an urgent response within seven days. This response is provided in accordance with the requirements of a judicial review pre-action protocol.

Proposed Claimants

(1)   The English Democrats

(2)   Robin Tilbrook

Proposed Defendant

(1)   The Prime Minister

(2)   The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care

Were proceedings to be issued, the proper defendant would be the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. References to the Defendant in this letter are to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.

The Defendant may be contacted via the Government Legal Department.  Due to COVID-19, service should, if possible, be effected by email rather than post to limit the handling of materials.  All future correspondence should be addressed to Tessa Hocking on behalf of the Treasury Solicitor, at Tessa.Hocking@governmentlegal.gov.uk, quoting reference number Z2005059/TIH/HOI7 and copying Robert Norgrove at Robert.Norgrove@governmentlegal.gov.uk.

Details of the Decision being Challenged

1. Your letter seeks to challenge the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020 (“the Regulations”), which were made by the Defendant and came into force on 26 March 2020. It appears from your letter that the challenge is to the entirety of the Regulations. 

2. The proposed challenge is misconceived. If a claim is commenced, we will invite the Court to refuse permission and certify the claim as totally without merit. We note that you will be familiar with this process, given that your claim in English Democrats v The Prime Minister & Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (CO/1322/2019) was similarly refused permission and certified as totally without merit.

The Legal and Factual Context

3. The entirety of the United Kingdom is presently affected by the global COVID-19 public health pandemic. The extremely serious risk to life and health posed by COVID-19 has obliged the Government to take unprecedented, vital steps to limit the spread of the virus, save lives, and reduce the burden on the National Health Service.

4. These measures include those set out in the Regulations, which came into force on 26 March 2020. The Regulations are applicable in England, although equivalent restrictions are in place across the rest of the United Kingdom.

5. The Regulations were made under the Part IIA of the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, for the purposes of “preventing, protecting against, controlling or providing a public health response to the incidence or spread of infection or contamination”: section 45C(1). The measures achieve precisely these purposes. They are similar to those instituted in countries across the world, faced with the same global public health emergency.

6. Your letter makes no reference to any particular provision of the Regulations, and it is accordingly unnecessary to set out their full terms and effect here. There is no dispute that the Regulations impose a comprehensive set of restrictions and requirements on all aspects of daily life, affecting every person in England, because of the unparalleled threat to life and to the effective functioning of the National Health Service posed by the pandemic. The Regulations seek to strike a careful balance between preventing the spread of COVID-19 and permitting essential services to continue during the emergency period.

7. The restrictions and requirements imposed by the Regulations remain in place from 26 March 2020 until the Secretary of State takes steps to terminate or amend them. The continuing need for those restrictions and requirements is required to be reviewed at three weekly intervals under the Regulations. In line with that requirement, a review of all aspects of the Regulations was carried out before the Government concluded on 16 April 2020 that the need for those restrictions and requirements had not materially altered. That need remains under constant review. 

8. Accordingly, the public health position in England has very recently been considered with the outcome that the Government continues to be of the view that the restrictions are necessary to address the incidence or spread of infection of COVID-19. Additionally, the Regulations are due to expire six months after coming into effect, being 25 September 2020.

9. Further, the Regulations were made by the Defendant under the emergency procedure set out in section 45R of the 1984 Act, by reason of their urgency, following which they must be approved by a resolution of each House within 28 days (leaving aside days on which Parliament is adjourned, prorogued or dissolved: section 45R(6)) or else they expire after that period: section 45R(4). The Regulations are tabled for debate in the Commons on 4th May 2020. It is therefore inaccurate for your letter to suggest that there is no Parliamentary scrutiny of these emergency Regulations.

Response

10. Although it is unclear precisely what grounds of challenge your letter advances in respect of the Regulations, any claim for judicial review would be misconceived.

11. First, the First Claimant is the subject of an outstanding Order for costs arising from CO/1322/2019, referred to above, in the sum of £2,755.99, which it has thus far failed to pay. The First Claimant was represented throughout those proceedings by the Second Claimant, who is also the National Chairman of the First Claimant. It is an abuse of process for a party to commence further proceedings when it has refused to comply with a Court Order in previous, unmeritorious, proceedings: see, e.g., Harbour Castle Limited v David Wilson Homes Limited [2019] EWCA Civ 505.

12. Secondly, no explanation is advanced in your letter as to how or why either of the proposed Claimants have standing to challenge the entirety of the Regulations, or in what way either or both of the proposed Claimants are relevantly victims of the asserted breaches of Articles 5, 8, 9, 11 and 1 and 2 of the First Protocol ECHR, as required by section 7 of the Human Rights Act 1998.

13. Thirdly, any claim for judicial review must be brought promptly: CPR r.54.5(1)(a). That freestanding requirement of promptitude is especially critical in a context of a general challenge to Regulations of the greatest national importance seeking to protect life on a mass scale, where reliance has been placed on them – and the population complying with them – for some five weeks. No explanation is given as to why your letter is only written now, when the arguments set out in it appear to be ones that could have been made from the very outset. Any claim would be refused permission for a failure to act promptly.

14. Fourthly, and in any event, the relevant restrictions in the Regulations do not give rise to any unlawful interference with any of the ECHR rights referred to in your letter.

15. As the Divisional Court held in R (Detention Action) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2020] EWHC 732 (Admin) at §27: “we must emphasise that it is the role of the court to assess the legality of the Secretary of State’s actions, not to second-guess legitimate operational choices. The circumstances presented by the COVID-19 pandemic are unprecedented and are unfolding hour by hour and day by day. Within sensible bounds the Secretary of State must be permitted to anticipate such events as she considers appropriate and respond to events as they unfold. As matters stand, it does seem to us that she has taken and will no doubt continue to take prudent measures, both precautionary and reactive.” The margin to be afforded to the Defendant is particularly extensive when faced with what Chamberlain J correctly described in University College London Hospitals Foundation Trust v MB [2020] EWHC 882 (QB) as “the most serious public health emergency for a century”: at §56.

16. All of the restrictions and requirements imposed by the Regulations pursue a legitimate aim: namely, the protection of public health. The Regulations are rationally connected to that aim: they seek to reduce to a minimum all contact between people so as to limit the spread of COVID-19 and to prevent so far as possible National Health Service resources being placed under an unmanageable strain. They are prescribed by law and strike a proportionate balance. In particular, the unprecedented measures taken in the Regulations, affecting every person and their way of life, are necessary to protect the lives of people in England during this public health emergency. This is the Government’s overriding concern. It is principally achieved by enforcing an extensive but proportionate reduction in all forms of social contact during the emergency period, in common with other countries across the world. The terms of the Regulations are kept under constant review, by reference to the constantly changing situation.

17. Accordingly, your letter is wrong to imply any inconsistency with the Siracusa Principles on the Limitation and Derogation Provisions in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, whether in relation to the Regulations or any approach to the review of those Regulations (so far as this is alleged), even if those Principles were of relevance to the ECHR.

18. Fifthly, the passing assertion that the Defendant has acted ultra vires is unexplained and is not understood. Nor is it understood, or explained, how the Regulations are “Contrary to the fundamental constitution of England as set out in Magna Carta and the English Parliamentary Constitutional Convention Declaration of Right of 1689 and its subsequent enactment in the English Bill of Rights 1689.” This is incoherent.

Action Requested and Urgency

19. For the above reasons, the Defendant does not agree that the Regulations are unlawful and must be rescinded.

20. Nor, in any event, are the Claimants entitled to demand the right to agree any replacement Regulations or guidance.

21. For the avoidance of doubt, any claim for judicial review issued will be defended and permission opposed. The Defendant’s full legal costs will be sought in the event that permission is refused.

Details of Other Interested Parties

22. There are no other interested parties.

Alternative Dispute Resolution

23. Alternative dispute resolution is not practical.

Requests for Information and Documents

24. No information or documents are sought.

Address for Further Correspondence and Service of Court Documents

25. As noted above, all future pre-action correspondence should be sent to, and in the event that proceedings are later issued, documents should be served by email to Tessa.Hocking@governmentlegal.gov.uk, copying Robert.Norgrove@governmentlegal.gov.uk.

26. Please acknowledge receipt of this letter.

Yours faithfully

T H

For the Treasury Solicitor

I am now working on the reply to this and I shall publish that too shortly.

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Robert Henderson’s response to Robin’s application for Judicial Review

Robert Henderson observations on the JR application:

Dear Robin,

This is certainly worth a go, for even if  the action  fails it will  probably shake up the Government sufficiently to get them to slacken the restrictions. The fact that there are reportedly a growing number of Tory MPs unhappy with the way things are going will also help this to happen.

 As to the merits of  the judicial review, the problems you would encounter seem to me to be these:

The powers you are saying are disproportionate are based on a recent Act of Parliament so there  is no question that  outdated  law is being used to obtain  a Government’s ends.

 The question of what Parliament can and cannot  do  is a   vexed one. The obvious argument from the Government side is that Parliament is sovereign and can do anything it chooses. The argument against this  is  that there are obligations  derived from Common Law or treaties a British Government has signed up to.

To the question of Common Law I would say this, Statute Law routinely  overturns directly or indirectly  Common Law judgements and precedents.

As for law deriving from international tries there are two points to make.  First,  treaties, for example the European  Convention or Human Rights, (ECHR)   frequently have very strong qualifications  which mean that the rights and freedoms supposedly protected are given only a  very limited protection in practise. For example here is the ECHR article supposedly protecting free expression 

Article 10 – Freedom of expression

 1Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises. 

The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

More generally if the supremacy of Parliament is accepted and the principle that no  Parliament can bind its successor  remains in play,  then logically no Parliament  can be prevented  from removing freedoms per se.

Proportionality

If you do go ahead with the Judicial Review then the strongest issues seem to me to be these;

1. Other countries such as Sweden have obtained a better or similar result in terms of deaths than the  despite operating a more relaxed regime than the UK.

If you can persuade  Professor Johan Giesecke to be a witness   that would be a plus because he is  both calm and authoritative. He also believes that no matter what regime is adopted by governments to deal with the virus  the outcome will be broadly similar. See

https://unherd.com/thepost/coming-up-epidemiologist-prof-johan-giesecke-shares-lessons-from-sweden/

  2. The UK Gover`nment is inconsistent in its rules, for example, it  has continued to   allow entry into the UK  with no routine  testing or enforced isolation of  thousands of people each day.  The Government claim this failure to act  is in response to their expert scientific advice  that it was not necessary.  Frankly, I think  most people, myself included,  will see that advice as self-evident  nonsense  The most   likely explanation for the failure to test and isolate is that it would be s politically sensitive.

If  people are allowed to continue  entering the country with no checks or isolation there is a serious danger of the virus being re-imported into the UK over and over again

3. The Government’s constant refrain that they act of the best scientific and medical advice is simply untrue.

Scientists often disagree  and like academics generally are more than happy to fight battles which have little to do with science and everything to do with ego and professional jealousies. This makes a nonsense of the increasingly pathetic bleat of Johnson and co that “We are acting on the best scientific and medical advice “.

 The upshot of this ploy is politicians not  choosing the “best and medical  and scientific advice ”  but the advice which best suits their political narrative and covers their political backs.

Moreover, as a matter of logic  politicians cannot be said to be following the best scientific  and medical advice  through choice  because  by definition they are not qualified to choose between competing professional  medical and scientific advice .

 5. It is becoming increasingly clear that the present regime is a cure worse than the disease.  The concentration on corolavirus is undoubtedly resulting in substantial numbers of deaths from non-corolavirus causes and will result in many more,  plus a great deal  of mental agony for sufferers and their  families.

 Cancer patients are having their treatments stopped, millions of elective operations have been scrapped or delayed and  there have been dramatic falls in Accident and Emergency patients generally with especially worrying falls in patients  possibly suffering from suspected heart attacks and strokes, presumably because people are either frightened to go into hospital with corolavirus about or simply out of a  misplaced sense that they did not want  to be a burden of the NHS  under present circumstances.  This stores up trouble for the future both for the patients and the NHS.

6. The public need to be trusted with harsh facts.  The  regret  generated by the  coronavirus deaths  is understandable but ignores one very important thing.  Put baldly the idea that some patients might be treated  more favourably than others, for example,  the young rather than the old, seems cruel. Yet this   is no more than what happens generally in emergency medical situations, namely,  the practice of triarging patients. (That is the dividing of patients into those who will most probably survive without treatment, those who would survive with treatment and those who would not  survive regardless of treatment.  )

In the context  of who is likely to survive, there is the question of  whether some  treatments   are too robust, especially for the old.  For example, it  is reported that “nearly all Covid-19 patients put on ventilators in New York’s largest health system died,”.  It is such a physically brutal intervention that, as has been hinted at in previous reports about ventilators, it may be killing people, especially the old,.   The procedure also requires very heavy sedation which may have seen  some on their way out of the World.

Brexit: the movie

Director  and narrator Martin Durkin

Running time 71 minutes

As an instrument   to rally the leave vote  Brexit: the movie is severely flawed.  It starts promisingly by stressing the loss of sovereignty , the lack of democracy in the EU and the corrupt greed of its servants (my favourite abuse was a shopping mall for EU politicians and bureaucrats only – eat your heart out Soviet Union) and the ways in which  Brussels spends British taxpayers money and sabotages industries such as fishing.  Then  it all begins to go sour.

The film’s audience should have been the British electorate  as a whole.  That means making a film which appeals to all who might vote to leave using arguments which are not nakedly  politically  ideological. Sadly, that is precisely what has not  happened here because Brexit the movie  has as   director and narrator Martin Durkin, a card carrying disciple of the neo-liberal creed. Here are a couple of snatches from his website:

Capitalism is the free exchange of services voluntarily rendered and received. It is a relationship between people, characterized by freedom. Adding ‘global’ merely indicates that governments have been less than successful at hindering the free exchange of people’s services across national boundaries.

And

Well it’s time to think the unthinkable again, and to privatise the biggest State monopoly of all … the monopoly which is so ubiquitous it usually goes unnoticed, but which has impoverished us more than any other and is the cause of the current world banking and financial crisis.  It is time to privatise money.

Unsurprisingly Durkin has filled the film with people who with varying degrees of fervour share his ideological beliefs. These include John Redwood,  James Delingpole, Janet Daley, Matt Ridley, Mark Littlewood,  Daniel Hannon, Patrick Minford, Melanie Phillips Simon Heffer, Michael Howard and  Douglas Carswell , all supporting the leave side but doing so in a way which would alienate those who have not bought into the free market free trade ideology. The only people interviewed in the film who were from the left of the political spectrum are Labour’s biggest donor John Wells and Labour MPs  Kate Hoey and Steve Baker.

There is also a hefty segment of the film  (20.50 minutes – 30 minutes)  devoted to a risibly false  description of Britain’s economic history from the beginnings of the industrial revolution to the  position of Britain in the 1970s.  In it Durkin claims that the nineteenth century was a time of a very unregulated British economy, both domestically and  with regard to international trade, which allowed Britain to grow and flourish wondrously .  In fact, the first century and half or so of the Industrial Revolution  up to around 1860 was conducted under what was known as the Old Colonial System,   a very  wide-ranging form of protectionism. In addition, the nineteenth century saw the introduction of many Acts which regulated the employment of children and the conditions of work for employees in general and  for much of the century  the century  magistrates had much wider powers than they do today such as setting the price of basic foodstuffs and wages and enforcing apprenticeships.

Durkin then goes on to praise Britain’s continued economic expansion up until the Great War which he ascribes to Britain’s rejection of protectionism. The problem with this is that   Britain’s adherence to the nearest any country have ever gone  to free trade – the situation  is complicated by Britain’s huge Empire –  between 1860 and 1914 is a period of comparative industrial decline  with highly protectionist countries such as the USA and Germany making massive advances.

Next, Durkin paints a picture of a Britain regulated half to death in the Great War, regulation which often  continued into the peacetime inter-war years before a further dose of war in 1939  brought with it even more state control. Finally, the period of 1945 to the coming of Thatcher is represented as a time of a British economy over-regulated and protected economy falling headlong  into an abyss of uncompetitive economic failure before  Thatcher rescued the country.

The reality is that Britain came out of the Great Depression faster than any other large economy, aided by a mixture of removal from the Gold Bullion Standard, Keynsian pump priming and re-armament, all of these being state measures.  As for the period 1945 until the oil shock of 1973,   British economic growth was higher than it has been  overall in the forty years  since.

Even if the film had given a truthful account of Britain’s economic history over the past few centuries  there would have been a problem. Having speaker after speaker putting forward the laissez faire  position, saying that Britain would be so much more prosperous if they could trade more with the rest of the world by  having much less regulation, being open to unrestricted foreign investment   and, most devastatingly,  that it  would allow people to be recruited from around the world rather than just the EU or EEA (with the implication that it is racist to privilege Europeans over people from Africa and Asia) is not  the way  to win people to the leave side.

The legacy of Thatcher  is problematic.  Revered by true believers in  the neo-liberal  credo she is hated by many  more for there  are still millions in the country who detest what she stood for and  for whom people spouting the same kind of rhetoric she used in support of Brexit  is  a  turn off. To them can be  added  many others who instinctively feel that globalisation is wrong and threatening and talk of economics in which human beings are treated as pawns deeply repulsive.

There is also a  truly  astonishing  omission in the film. At the most modest assessment immigration is one of the major concerns of  British electors  (and probably the greatest concern  when the fear of being called a racist if one opposes immigration is factored in), yet the film avoids the subject. There is a point  towards the end of the film (go in at  61 minutes) when it briefly  looks as though it might be raised when the commentary poses the question “Ah, what if the  EU proposes a trade deal which forces upon us open borders and other stuff  we don’t like?   But that leads to no discussion  about immigration,  merely the  statement of  the pedantically  true claim that Britain  does not have to sign a treaty if its terms are not acceptable. This of course begs the question of who will decide what is acceptable. There a has been no suggestion that there are any lines in the sand which will not be crossed in negotiations with the EU and there is no promise of a second referendum after terms have been negotiated with the EU or, indeed,  with any other part of the world. Consequently,   electors can have no confidence those who conduct  negotiations will not give away vital things such as control of our borders.

As immigration is such a core part of  what  British voters worry about most ,both in the EU context and immigration generally,  it is difficult to come up with a an explanation for this startling omission  which  is not pejorative. It can only have been done for one of two reasons:  either the maker of the film  did not want the issue addressed or many of those appearing in the film  would  not have appeared if the  immigration drum had been beaten.  In view of both Durkin’s ideological position and the general tenor of the film,  the most plausible reason is that Durkin did not want the subject discussed because the idea of free movement of labour is a central part of the neo-liberal  ideology. He will see labour as simply a factor of production along with land and capital. Durkin  even managed to include interviews conducted in Switzerland (go in at 52 minutes )which  painted the country as a land of milk and honey without  mentioning that the Swiss had a citizen initiated referendum on restricting immigration in 2014 and are pushing for another.

The point at issue is not whether neo-liberalism is a good or a bad thing,  but the fact that an argument for leaving the EU which is primarily based on the ideology is bound to alienate many who do not think kindly of the EU, but who do not share the neo-liberal’s enthusiasm for an  unregulated or under-regulated  economy   and  a commitment to globalism, which frequently means  jobs are either off-shored or taken by immigrants who undercut wages and place a great strain on public services. This in practice results in mass immigration , which apart from competition for jobs, houses  and services,   fundamentally alters the  nature of the areas of  Britain in  which  immigrants settle and,  in the longer term, the  nature of Britain itself .

The excessive  concentration on economic matters is itself a major flaw, because  most of the electorate  will  variously not be able to understand , be bored by the detail  and turn off or  simply disregard the claims made as being  by their  nature  unknowable in reality. The difficulty of incomprehension and boredom is  compounded by there being  far  too many talking heads, often  speaking for a matter of seconds at a time.  I also found the use of Monty Python-style graphics irritatingly shallow and  a sequence lampooning European workers compared with the Chinese downright silly (go in at  37 minutes).

What the film should have done was rest  the arguments for leaving on the question of  sovereignty.  That is what this vote is all about: do you want Britain to be a sovereign nation ? Everything flows from the question of sovereignty : can we control our borders?; can we make our own laws?  Once sovereignty is seen as the only real question, then what we may or may not do after regaining our sovereignty is in our hands. If the British people wish to have a  more regulated market they can vote for it. If they want a neo-liberal economy they can vote for it. The point is that at present we cannot vote for either . As I mentioned in my introduction the sovereignty issue is raised many times in the film.  The problem is that it was so often  tied into the idea of free trade and unregulated markets that the sovereignty message raises the question in many minds of what will those with power – who overwhelmingly have bought into globalism and neo-liberal economics –  do with sovereignty rather than the value of sovereignty itself.

Will the film help the leave cause? I think it is the toss of a coin whether it will persuade more people to vote leave than or alienate more with  its neo-liberal message.

Brexiteers: hold your nerve

Robert Henderson

Recent polls are overall veering towards   but not decisively towards a remain  win in the referendum.  It is important that those wanting  leave the EU should not get downhearted. There are still the TV debates to come which will expose the often hypocritical and always vacuous positions those advocating  a vote to remain will of necessity have to put forward because  they have no hard facts to support their position and  can offer only a catalogue of ever more wondrously improbable disasters they claim will happen if Brexit occurs, everything from the collapse of the world economy to World War III  The only things they have  not predicted are a giant  meteorite hitting Earth and wiping out the  human race or, to entice the religious inclined vote, the coming of the end of days.

There are other signs which should hearten the leave camp. There appears little doubt that those who intend to vote to leave  will on average be more likely to turn out to vote than those who  want to remain.. This is partly because older voters  favour Brexit more than younger voters and older voters are much more likely to turn out and actually vote.  But there is also the question of what people are voting for.  Leaving  to become masters in our own house is a positive message. There is nothing  positive about the remain  side’s blandishments.  A positive message is always likely to energise people to act than a negative one. Moreover, what the remain side are saying directly or by implication is that at best they have no confidence in their own country and at worst they want Britain to be in the EU to ensure that it is emasculated as a nation state because they disapprove of nation states.  Such a stance will make even those tending towards voting to remain to perhaps either not vote or to switch to voting leave.

What should we make of the polls?

What should we make of the polls?  Leaving aside the question of how accurate they are, it is interesting that the polls which are showing strongest for a vote to remain are the telephone polls. Those conducted online tend to produce a close result, often half and half on either side.  Some have the Leave side ahead. On the face of things this is rather odd because traditional polling wisdom has it that online polls will tend to favour younger people for the obvious reason that the young are much more likely be comfortable living their lives online than  older people.  Even if online polls are chosen to represent a balanced sample including age composition the fact that older people are generally not so computer savvy means that any sample used with older people is unlikely to represent older generally whereas  the part of the polling audience which is young can be made to represent  the  younger part of the population  because  almost all of the young use digital technology without thinking.

It is likely that the older people who contribute to online polls are richer and  better educated on average than the old as a group. But that  brings its own problem for the remain side because another article of faith amongst pollsters is that the better educated and richer you are the more likely you are to vote to remain  in the EU.  Moreover, if the samples are properly selected for both online and  phone polls why should there be such a difference?   Frankly, I have my doubts about  samples being  properly selected because  there are severe practical problems when it comes to  identifying the people who will make a representative sample.  Polling companies also weight their  results which must at the least introduce an element of subjectivity. Then there is also the panel effect where pollsters use panels made up of people they have vetted and  decided are panel material.  Pollsters admit all these difficulties.  You can find the pollster YouGov’s  defence of such practices and how they supposedly overcome their  difficulties here.

The performance of pollsters in recent years has been underwhelming.  It could be that their polling on the referendum is  badly  wrong.  That could be down to the problems detailed in the previous paragraph, but it could also be how human beings respond to different forms of polling.  Pollsters have been caught out by the “silent Tory” phenomenon  whereby voters are unwilling to say they intend to vote Tory much more often than voters for other parties such  as Labour and the LibDems  are unwilling to admit they will be voting for those parties.   It could be that there  are “silent Brexiteer”  voters who  refuse to admit to wanting to vote  to leave the  EU,  while there are  no  or very few corresponding  “silent remain” voters.  This could explain why Internet polls show more Brexit voters than phone or face-to-face  polls.  If a voter is speaking to a pollster, especially if they are in the physical company of the pollster, the person will feel they are being judged by the person asking the questions.  If they think their way of voting is likely to be disapproved of by the questioner  because it is not the “right view”,   the person being questioned may well feel embarrassed if they say they are supporting  a view which goes against what  is promoted every day in the mainstream media as the “right view” .  The fact that the person asking the questions is also likely  to come from the same general class as those who dominate the mainstream media  heightens the likelihood of embarrassment on the part of those being questioned.

The “embarrassment factor”  is a phenomenon  which  can be seen in the polling on contentious subjects  generally. Take  immigration  as an example. People are terrified of being labelled as a racist. At the same time they are quite reasonably very anxious  about the effects of mass immigration.  They  try to square the circle of their real beliefs with their fear of being labelled a racist – and it takes precious little for the cry of racist to go up these days – by seizing  on reasons to object to mass immigration which they believe have been sanctioned as safe by those with power  and influence such  as saying that they are not  against immigrants but they  think that illegal immigrants should be sent home or that the numbers of immigrants should be much reduced because of the pressure on schools, jobs, hospitals and housing . What they dare not say is  that they object to immigration full stop because it changes the nature of their society.

There is an element of the fear of being called a racist  in Brexit because a main, probably the primary issue for  most of those wanting to vote to leave  in the referendum is the control of borders. This means that   saying you are for Brexit raises in the person’s mind a worry that this will be interpreted as racist at worst and “little Englanderish” at best.

There is a secondary reason why  those being interviewed are nervous. The poll they are contributing to will not be just a single question, such  as how do you intend to vote in the European referendum?  There will be  a range of questions which are designed to show things such as propensity to vote or which issues are the most important. Saying immigration control raises the problem of fear of being  classified as  racist, but there will be other issues which are nothing like as contentious on which the person being polled really does not have a coherent   opinion.  They will then feel a fear of being thought ignorant or stupid if they cannot explain lucidly why they feel this or that policy is important.

That leaves the question of why online polls show more for Brexit and phone or face-to-face-polls.  I suggest this. Answering a poll online is impersonal. There is no sense of being immediately judged by another.  The psychology is akin to going into a ballot booth  and voting.  This results in more honesty  about voting to leave.

The referendum  is just the beginning of the  war

Whatever the result of the referendum that will not be the end of matters. There is a gaping  hole in the referendum debate . There has been no commitment  by  any politician to what exactly  they would be asking for from  the EU if the vote is to leave and what they would definitely not accept.   Should that happen we must do our best ensure that those undertaking the negotiations on Britain’s behalf do not surreptitiously  attempt to subvert the vote by stitching Britain back into the EU by negotiating a treaty which obligates Britain to  such things as free movement of people  between Britain and the EU and a  hefty payment each year to the EU (a modern form of Danegeld).   A vote to leave must give Britain back her sovereignty  utterly  and that means Westminster being able to  pass any laws it wants  and that these   will supersede any  existing  obligations to foreign states and institutions, having absolute control of Britain’s borders, being able to protect strategic British  industries and giving preference to British companies where public contracts are offered to  private business.

It there is a  vote to remain  that does not mean the question of  Britain leaving is closed for a generation  any more than the vote of Scottish independence sealed the matter for twenty years or more.  For another referendum  to be ruled out for several decades would be both dangerous and profoundly undemocratic.

Imagine that Britain  having voted to remain the EU decides to push through legislation to bring about the United States of Europe which many of the most senior Eurocrats and pro-EU politicians have made no bones about wanting,  the EU  wants Turkey  to be given membership,  immigration from and via the EU continues to run out of hand  or  the EU adopts regulations for  financial services which gravely  damage the City of London.  Are we to honestly say that no future referendum cannot be held?

Of course on some issues such as the admission of new members  Britain still has a veto  but can we be certain that it would used to stop Turkey joining?  David Cameron has made it all too  clear that he supports  Turkey’s accession and the ongoing immigrant crisis in the Middle East has already wrung the considerable concession of visa-free travel in the Schengen Area from the EU without the Cameron government offering any complaint. Instead all that Cameron does is bleat that Britain still has border controls which allow Britain to refuse entry to and deport those from outside the EU and the European Economic Area.  However, this is the same government which has been reducing Britain’s border force and has deported by force very few people.

You may  think that if new members are admitted to the EU a referendum would automatically be held under the European Union Act of 2011. Not so, viz: .

4 Cases where treaty or Article 48(6) decision attracts a referendum

(4)A treaty or Article 48(6) decision does not fall within this section merely because it involves one or more of the following—

(a)the codification of practice under TEU or TFEU in relation to the previous exercise of an existing competence;

(b)the making of any provision that applies only to member States other than the United Kingdom;

(c)in the case of a treaty, the accession of a new member State.

In practice it would be up to the government of the day to decide whether a referendum should be held.  The  circumstances where the Act requires a referendum are to do with changes to the powers and duties of EU members. The simple  accession of a new member does not fall under those heads. Nor does the Act provide for a referendum where there is no change to existing EU treaties or massive changes are made  without a Treaty being involved, for example,  Britain has had no referendum on Turkey  being given visa free movement within  the Schengen Area. Make sure you vote

Regardless of what the Polls say make sure you vote The bigger the victory for the OUT side the less the Europhiles will be able to do to subvert what happens after the vote.   If the vote is to stay  the closer it is the less traction it gives the -Europhiles .  Either way, the vote on the 23 June is merely the first battle in a war, not the end of the war.

Article 50 is a poisoned chalice – Don’t drink from it

Robert Henderson

Those who think that British Europhile politicians   will  play fair if Britain votes to leave the EU in June will be horribly disappointed. The public may think that if the British people have voted to leave the EU and that is an end of it regardless of the wishes of the Government.   Sadly, there is every reason to expect that Brexit will be anything but a clean break from the EU.

To begin with there has been no commitment by Cameron to stand down as PM if the vote goes against him.  Quite the opposite for he  has publicly stated several  times that  he will stay on and many  Tory MPs, including some of those in favour of leaving like Chris Grayling ,  have said that he must remain in No 10 whatever the outcome of the referendum .

If Cameron stays on as PM after a vote to leave Britain would be in the absurd position of having a man in charge of  Britain’s withdrawal who has shown his all too eager  commitment to the EU by the feebleness of   the demands he made during  his “renegotiation” and his regularly repeated statement before the conclusion of the “renegotiation”  that he was sure he would get new terms which would allow him to campaign for Britain to remain within the EU.   

A post-referendum   Cameron  government entrusted with negotiating Britain’s departure from the EU would mean that not only the  PM  but  the majority of his  cabinet and ministers below  cabinet  level  will  be  drawn from the same pro-EU personnel as he has today.  In those circumstances Cameron and his fellow Europhiles would almost certainly try to stitch Britain back into the EU with a deal such as that granted to  Norway and Switzerland. If that happened Britain could end up with the most important issue in the British  public’s mind –  free movement  of not only labour but free movement of anyone with the right to permanent residence in the EU – untouched .

But if Cameron leaves  of his own accord soon after a vote to leave Britain could still end up with a Europhile  Prime Minister and Cabinet.  Why? By  far the most likely person to succeed him  is Boris Johnson. If he  does become  PM there is every reason to believe that he will also do his level best to enmesh Britain back into  the EU.  Ever since Johnson  became the Telegraph’s  Brussels correspondent in the 1990s he has been deriding the EU, but until coming out as a supporter of voting to leave in the past week he has never advocated Britain’s withdrawal.  Johnson also gave a very strong hint  in the  Daily Telegraph article in which he announced his support for leaving the EU that his support for Britain leaving the EU was no more than  a ploy to persuade the EU to offer  more significant concessions than those offered to Cameron. Johnson has also been a regular advocate of the value of immigration.

The scenario of Cameron or Johnson deliberately subverting the intention of a referendum vote  to leave are all too plausible. There has been no public discussion let alone  agreement by leading  politicians over what the British government may or may not negotiate in the event of a vote to leave.   Nor has there been any suggestion by any British politician or party  that whatever the terms offered by the EU the British public will have the right to vote on them in a referendum.  Britain could be left  with  an agreement decided by the British Government and the EU which might do nothing of what  the British public most wants and  has voted for, namely, the return of sovereignty and  the control of Britain’s borders.

Then  there is Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.  Both Cameron and Johnson are committed to doing so within the terms of the Lisbon Treaty of  2009.  Far from a vote to leave in the referendum putting Britain in the position of a  sovereign nation engaging in a negotiation for a treaty with the EU  it traps  Britain into an extended period of negotiation whose outcome is dependent on the agreement or non-agreement of  the 27 other EU member states and the  EU Parliament.  Let me quote  the Article in  full:

Article 50

1. Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.
2. A Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention. In the light of the guidelines provided by the European Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. That agreement shall be negotiated in accordance with Article 218(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It shall be concluded on behalf of the Union by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament.
3. The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.
4. For the purposes of paragraphs 2 and 3, the member of the European Council or of the Council representing the withdrawing Member State shall not participate in the discussions of the European Council or Council or in decisions concerning it.

A qualified majority shall be defined in accordance with Article 238(3)(b) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

5. If a State which has withdrawn from the Union asks to rejoin, its request shall be subject to the procedure referred to in Article 49. (

Article 50  means that Britain could spend two years negotiating and get no treaty because the Council of Ministers could veto it through Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) or the European Parliament reject it. Britain would then have the option of either asking for an extension (which could be indefinite because there is no limit mentioned in the Article) or leaving without a treaty.  There is also the further complication that if a treaty was agreed by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament it would still have to be agreed by 27 EU member states,  either through Parliamentary vote or  in the case of a few including France, a referendum.  Moreover,  even if a treaty is agreed and accepted by all EU member states, this would leave  Britain up in the air for what could be a considerable time as each of the 27 members goes through the process of getting  the agreement of their Parliament or electorate.

The OUT camp must make it clear that  it would be both damaging and unnecessary for the UK to abide by this Treaty requirement. It  would allow the EU to inflict considerable damage on the UK both during the period prior to formally  leaving and afterwards if  the price of leaving with the EU’s agreement was  for  UK to sign up to various obligations, for example, to continue paying a large annual sum to the EU for ten years . It would also give  the Europhile UK political elite  ample opportunity to keep the UK attached to the EU in the manner that Norway and Switzerland are attached by arguing that it is the best deal Britain  can get.  If there was no second  referendum on the  terms  negotiated for Britain leaving the government of the day could simply pass the matter into law without the British voters having a say.

The Gordian knot of Article 50 can be cut simply repealing the European Communities Act and asserting the sovereignty of Parliament.   No major UK party could  object to this on principle because all three have, at one time or another,  declared that Parliament remains supreme and can repudiate anything the EU does if it so chooses.

If the stay-in camp argue that would be illegal because of the  treaty obligation, the OUT camp should simply emphasise  (1) that international law is no law because there is never any means of enforcing it within its jurisdiction is a state rejects it and (2) that treaties which do not allow for contracting parties to simply withdraw are profoundly undemocratic because they bind future governments. There is also the fact that the EU and its predecessor the EEC has constantly breached its own rules, spectacularly so in the case of the Eurozone.  Hence, for the EU treaties are anything but sacrosanct.

Defend your national territory or lose it

Robert Henderson

The present attempts of migrants from around the Mediterranean and  beyond to effectively invade Europe have brought the long simmering immigration threat to a head.  First World   politicians can no longer pretend it is under any sort of control. The question those in the First World have to answer is  gruesomely simple: are they willing  to defend the their own territory as they  would if faced with an armed invader  and by doing so preserve their way of life and safety , or will they allow a fatal sentimentality  to paralyse the entirely natural wish to stop invaders until the native populations of the First World are at best a tolerated minority in their own ancestral lands and at worst the subject of acts of genocide.

The Prime Minister of Hungary Victor Orlan  has had the courage to point out  something which is obvious but anathema to the politically correct elites of Europe, namely, that  immigration on the current scale will result in Europeans becoming a minority in  their own continent with a consequent loss of European values.  Anyone who thinks that Europe (and the rest of the First World) is not in danger should think on these facts:

• The population of the world is approximately 7 billion. At the most generous estimate only one billion live in the First World.
• The population of the world is estimated to grow by another two billion by 2050 with all the growth being in the Third World.
• The white population of the world is projected to be in a minority in Europe and North America by 2050.
• The First World already has large minorities of those from racial and ethnic groups whose antecedents are in the Third World and who have had their sense of victimhood at the hands of whites  fed assiduously by white liberals for over 50 years. Once established in a First World  country they agitate for the right to bri9ng relatives over and to relax immigration control generally. A  recent report by the think tank Policy Exchange estimates that one third of the UK population with be from an ethnic minority by 2050.
• Political power in most of the First World is in the hands of politicians who are quislings in the service of internationalism   in its modern guise of globalism.
• Those working in the mass media of the First World share the ideology of First World politicians with bells on, missing no chance to propagandise in favour of mass immigration.
• The First World is funding its  own destruction by feeding the Third World with huge amounts of Aid . This promotes war throughout the Third World (providing a driver for Third World  immigrants to the First World) and, most importantly, increases the  populations of the Third World which rapidly outstrip the  economic carrying capacity of their societies.

At present the mainstream media in countries such as Britain and the  USA are voraciously feeding the public what amounts to unashamed propaganda  to persuade them to accept not merely huge numbers of Third World immigrants now,  but an ongoing and ever increasing stream in the not too distant future as the invading hordes gather around the Mediterranean waiting for their chance to entered the promised land of the rich European states of the north.

It is easy to be swayed by photos of  a  young child who has died or   boatloads crammed to the gunnels with miserable looking people  to the point where the resolution to defend your native territory is overridden, but look at the aggression and sense of entitlement the invaders, for  that is what they are, as they battle to leave Hungary. They are in the position of supplicants but far from begging for help they demand as a right that they be let into the richer countries of Europe.

There are very few if any places outside of Europe and  the Anglosphere countries of the United Kingdom,  North America, Australia and New Zealand  which have any serious history of freedom and the rule of law and even amongst that group only the Anglosphere has  enjoyed  both an uninterrupted political system of representative government and been free of civil war for a century or more.  These are countries which have the very rare and valuable attribute of having worked out a social and political system which creates peace and tolerance. That seriously at risk because of mass immigration. Does anyone believe  for example, a that Britain in which there was a Muslim majority would remain a Parliamentary democracy or have any regard for free expression?

Those amongst the native populations of the  First World who propagandise in favour of mass immigration do so in the belief that they will be untouched by the immigration because they live in affluent areas where immigrants cannot generally settle. Not for these people state schools which “boast” that “there are 100 languages here”; not for these people a need for increasingly scarce affordable (social)  housing  in places such as London; not for these people having to use grossly over subscribed medical services in their area.  These people think they are safe  from the effects of mass immigration,  but if it continues their children and grandchildren will not be so lucky. There needs to be a penalty for those who promote and facilitate mass immigration, for example,  forcing them to take immigrants  into their homes and be responsible for their upkeep .

Mass immigration  is conquest not by armed force but by those who are come equipped only with their victimhood and misery and, most potently, the  mentality of the elites in the First World who subscribe to the idea of white guilt and the white populations of the First World who have been browbeaten  into believing that they cannot have any world other than a globalist world which includes huge movements of peoples. We are seeing the scenario described by Jean Raspail begin to play out.

Homo sapiens is the social animal par excellence. All social animals need boundaries to their group because trust has to exist between the members of the group. Human beings can tolerate very large numbers in their group, but there is a limit. To be a member of a functioning human group,  whether that be tribe,  clan or nation,  the members or the group must share sufficient distinguishing behaviours and  attributes to create the necessary trust. Putting huge numbers of people with very disparate background together cannot create that trust. Anyone who doubts that should try to find any society where territory is shared by different racial or ethnic groups  that does not have inter-group discord,. They will not find one in history or the present.

If you wish to save your country ignore the  misery now being waved in your face and concentrate not on the immediate present but the future.  Say no to further mass immigration by voting to leave the EU because while Britain is in it nothing can be done to stop massive numbers of immigrants continuing to come to Britain.  Leaving the EU will  remove from our political elite any excuse for not stopping the causal destruction of our country.

Civitas Meeting – The trouble with Europe 19 May 2014

Robert Henderson

The sole speaker was Roger Bootle of the Daily Telegraph and Capital Economics

Bootle was  promoting his book The trouble with Europe.  The main thrusts of his argument  were

–          Europe is a declining political and economic power.

–          The growth rate within first the EEC and then the EU has been poor overall compared with economies outside the EU.

–          The EU has undermined European economic performance through promoting too generous welfare states.

–          That much of the regulation comes not from the EU but national governments within the EU.

–          That the EU has smothered competition between nation states and this has hindered innovation and enterprise.

–          That Europe’s period of  greatest world dominance was a time of intense competition between European powers.

–          That EU countries have suffered a loss of identity through mass immigration and those with empires had  a further blow to their national self-confidence through their loss.

–          That European elites have had their energies eaten up with trying to create uniformity within the EU to the detriment of such things as investment and productivity.

–          That the Euro is the biggest  economic disaster the EU has suffered,  dwarfing the Common Agricultural Policy.

–          The EU as it is presently constituted is obsolete.

Bootle laid down his terms for Britain  remaining within the EU: an end to ever closer union,   a guarantee of no second class status for the UK if she remains a member, a reduced EU budget, repatriation of powers to EU member states. National governments to be empowered to reject EU legislation and restrictions on the free movement of labour.

These conditions  are  so improbable that it is reasonable to conclude that Bootle in reality wants Britain out of the EU. If Britain does leave the EU, Bootle is in favour of what he called the WTONLY option if a good free trade agreement with the EU cannot be arranged. The WTONLY option is to simply leave the EU and then rely on World Trade Organisation rules to give Britain access to EU markets.

During questions it was heartening to see how many of the questioners were utterly hostile to the EU, despite the fact that many  of those there came under the heading of the great and the good, the sort of people who would normally be considered unvarnished  Europhiles.   Most promisingly, voices were raised against the wholesale takeover by foreigners of British business and the ill effects of multinationals.

I raised the question of how Britain should deal with the mechanics of leaving bearing in mind that the entire British political elite were Europhiles who would do everything to subvert the wishes of the British electorate by stitching Britain back into the EU through an agreement which included the four so-called EU freedoms, the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour within the EU. I suggested to Bootle that Article 50 was a poisoned chalice which would enable British politicians to do just that.  Rather surprisingly Bootle said that he did not think that the mechanics of leaving were important.  I was not able to question him further because of the number of people wanting to ask questions. However, I have addressed the subject and others in the email I sent to Bootle after the meeting. If I receive a reply I will add it to this blog post.

———————————————————————————

E mail sent to Roger Bootle 31 5 2014

Dear Mr Bootle,

A few points I  was unable to put to you at the Civitas meeting of  19 May.

1. How much do you think the status of the  Euro as  the second largest reserve currency has contributed to the survival of the Euro?  I enclose a note on this at the bottom of the email.

2. You advocate giving both sides of the story, of admitting that leaving the EU will not be without costs both material and moral.  The problem with that is twofold.

a) political knowledge and understanding amongst the electorate  as a whole  is  minute. Most will respond to the fear factor points not the reassuring points simply because they do not know enough to assess the situation rationally.

b) all the STAY IN camp will be peddling is the fear factor. Hence, the electorate will be hearing the fear factor language from both YES and NO camps but only the reassuring points from those who wish Britain to leave.

3. How the UK leaves the  EU is not a trivial matter as you suggested. The danger is that regardless of the wishes of the electorate ,  the British political elite will stitch us back firmly into the EU if they are given a free hand over the negotiation. This is so because we have a political class – especially the leading members of the class –  which is  overwhelmingly prepared to act as Quislings (Quislings in the service of the EU in particular and internationalism in general) to ensure that Britain does not escape the tentacles of the EU.

Of course such a betrayal could apply regardless of whether article 50 is activated or a simple repeal made  of the various Acts binding  us into the EU, but  Article 50 carries far more dangers for those who want us out of the EU than a simple repeal of the Acts  would do.  If Britain accepted the legality of Article 50  we  would have to put up with any amount of prevarication and dirty tricks for two years.  Worse,  the time to reach any  agreement between Britain and the EU under article 50 can be extended if both parties agree.

As those negotiating on behalf of Britain would inevitably be politicians who have sold their souls to the “European Project”, the odds are that they would use any obstruction and delay by the EU to justify making an agreement which would practically speaking nullify the vote to leave.  As sure as eggs are eggs, the agreement would  place  us  firmly back into the EU’s clutches  by signing Britain up to the four EU “freedoms” (freedom of movement of goods, services, capital and labour)  and all the rules regulating the single market.  If the break with the EU is done simply by repealing the various Acts which bind us in, our politicians will not be able to use the restrictions and difficulties raised by Article 50 as an excuse for selling the voters down the river with an agreement such as I have described.  Instead, they would have to take full responsibility for whatever they agree to.  Article 50 is a particularly toxic poisoned chalice.  Don’t drink from it.

It is essential that before any referendum takes place that all mainstream UK parties make it clear that whatever  agreement  is reached by those negotiating on behalf of Britain this should only be ratified if the British people vote for it in a second referendum.  Unless this happens the political class will give us something which binds us back into the EU.

5. It is a dangerous argument to claim that competition between governments is a good thing if you are relying on the historical example.  In your Telegraph article Europe’s politicians must embrace competition or face slide into obscurity (19 May) you write:

It is very striking that Europe’s golden age, when European countries bestrode the world and European influence was at its height, was an era of competition between nation states. Admittedly at times this competition went too far and spilled over into war …

The reality of European history is that it has been primarily a history of war as far as you care to go back. War not peace has been the norm. The period of European ascendency was no exception to this and because of technological developments became more and more efficiently brutal.    Use the European historical example and you are simply inviting the Europhiles to say “Told you so. Nation states can’t be trusted to behave”.

6. At present I also have a problem with  all political discussions  and especially those referring to the economy.   We are within striking distance of the production of general purpose robots which will be able to do not only most of the jobs humans now do but most of any new ones which arise.   The implications of this are so profound that they bid fair to render any political solutions or policies currently in play obsolete.  Politicians should be planning for such developments but they are simply ignoring them.  If you read  these two pieces you will see where I am coming from:

https://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/robotics-and-the-real-sorry-karl-you-got-it-wrong-final-crisis-of-capitalism/

https://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2013/06/23/technology-out-of-control/

Yours sincerely,

 

Robert Henderson

 

 

 

The Camp of the Saints tested against reality

English translation from the French by Norman Shapiro, Professor of French Romance Languages and Literatures Department 3089, Wesleyan University,  Connecticut, USA.   Email nshapiro@wesleyan.edu

The full English text can be found at https://archive.org/stream/CampOfTheSaints/Camp_of_the_Saints_djvu.txt

Robert Henderson

The French writer Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints  was  published in 1973. It is notorious or famous,  according to your politics,  for its story of  the Third World poor successfully invading the First World. The invaders come  armed not with guns and bombs,  but the potent weapons of  their huge  numbers and  the knowledge  that  the self-destructive  ideology of Western elites  – what we would  nowadays call  the “anti-racist” part of political correctness  – had warped the minds of most of those  elites  and also  those  of the masses of  the First World,  who  have been beaten into a state  where they either cannot see when their own interests are being sacrificed on the altar of one worldism or are cowed to the point where  they are paralysed into inaction.

At the time of its writing the  book  was set in twenty or so years in  the future. As the story opens a  fleet of 100 ramshackle ships  dubbed the Ganges Armada  gathers in India and soon  sets off  for Europe.  In the ships are one million of the subcontinent’s poor.  The intention of the Armada is to run  the ships aground on European shores – this is a strictly one way voyage – decant their cargo and present the land on which they descend  with a dilemma, namely,  allow the million  to invade or resist them with force with the ultimate sanction being mass slaughter of the invaders.

It takes  the ships fifty daysto arrive on the northern shores of the Mediterranean with Southern France as the final  destination.   As the Ganges Armada sails the Western elites are either  starry eyed about their dream of a world in which there is no us and them – no nation states, just Mankind  with a capital M –  or paralysed by the one-world propaganda which has been so assiduously fed to them.

Even those members of the elite who do not  believe in the One Worldism  have developed the  peculiar state of mind which arises  when  propaganda is not only incessant but gainsaying the propaganda is seen as   dangerous.  Such people do not embrace the content of the propaganda,  nor play along out of abject and immediate  fear. Rather, they sublimate the fear and develop a feeling that to rebut the propaganda is somehow wrong, although if asked they could not say exactly where the wrongness lay.   The state of mind is akin to that of a person who feels that a sick joke is inappropriate if expressed in company even if it makes them inwardly laugh.  In short, they have been conditioned to think of certain ideas and words as unclean for no other reason that they have been told over and over again that these things are beyond the Pale.   As for the masses,  they have variously bought into the propaganda,   had their true feelings suppressed  by the constant propaganda as described above or  been censored out of public life.

But human nature has not been utterly transformed.  There is the natural  human response to trouble of thinking it will not happen. While the Ganges Armada is a long way off heads are buried in the sand with non-pc thoughts such as that the ships will all be sunk by rough weather and seas  before they reach Europe because of their decrepit state.  Hardly anyone in a position of authority or influence is realistic and honest about the outcome of the Armada if it reaches its destination , namely,  that it will be an invasion which if not resisted will overturn the societies into which the human cargo,  full of misery  and entitlement, is decanted.  Instead they either preach the  message that  the arrival of the Armada will be a great blessing for it will allow the West to show its generosity of spirit by welcoming the invaders with open arms or indulge in the hypocrisy of secretly hoping the ships will founder at sea.

But the weather is unusually clement and the Ganges Armada comes closer and closer until its arrival off the French Mediterranean coast is imminent.  This causes the vast majority of the population of the South of France  to abandon any pretence of seeing the ships’  arrival as anything other than a threat  and the vast majority  flee to the North of France. This is only a temporary place of safety and before  long much of the French elite also hot-foot it  to Switzerland ,  thinking wrongly that it will be a haven against the One Worldist mania –eventually the Swiss fall prey to the same lack of will to resist the invaders and open their borders to the invading Third World hordes.

The most naïve of the  One Worlders advance towards  the point at which the ships will make landfall in the sublimely silly expectation that they will be welcomed with open arms  by the invading one million. Once they  arrive the One Worldist simpletons are at best ignored and at worst attacked. They also find that they are at risk from the Third World immigrants and their descendants who are  already in France.

When the Ganges Armada finally  arrives and  sheds its cargo of one million there is little resistance because not only have most of the population fled , but the  French armed forces prove worthless, most having been robbed of the will to resist the invasion with  brute force by the ceaseless propaganda which has been fed to them.   The result is mass desertions.

The Ganges Armada is only the beginning.  Other fleets full of  Third World  misery to west upon the West  are being prepared. Nor is it just a seaborne invasion. Even as the Ganges Armada is at sea huge numbers of Chinese are massing on the Chinese border with the Asiatic Russian territories.

The novel ends with France overrun and the white native French population reduced to not exactly slavery but an irrelevance as power shifts to the non-white migrants who were either in France before the Armada arrived or are part of the Armada and its successor Third World invasion. The same general thing happens throughout the West, with the white native population everywhere becoming subordinate, becoming strangers in a strange land which was once theirs but is now utterly changed.

How prophetic is  the Camp of the Saints? Raspail understood when he published the  book that it would not  be prophetic in the detail of his imaginings,    but only in his  general  message. Indeed, in  his short preface  he admits that the detail of the action in the book is unrealistic: “I had wanted to write  a lengthy preface to explain my position and show that this is no wild-eyed dream; that even if the specific action, symbolic as it is, may seem farfetched, the fact remains that we are inevitably heading for something of the sort. We need only glance at the awesome population figures predicted for the year 2000, i.e., twenty-eight years from now: seven billion people, only nine hundred million of whom will be white.”

The invasion of the First World has not occurred as  dramatically as Raspail portrayed it. If it had perhaps even the Quisling politically correct  politicians of the West would have been forced to resist it with force,  both because they feared the fury of the people they supposedly represented and for fear of what the reality would be if such an invasion force had landed.  Instead the immigration  has  happened piecemeal, surreptitiously.  There has never been a dramatic massing  of Third World immigrants to gain entry to the First World Promised Land in one fell swoop, just an  incessant trickle through numerous points of entry. The nearest events  to what Raspail describes  are the various boat people  arriving in the West  from Latin America, Africa and Asia. But although large in aggregate,  each individual attempt at invasion contains hundreds at best and most commonly in numbers of less than ten. When seaborne they come not as an imposing  fleet but singly or as a small flotilla  at worst.  More commonly their illegal entry is by plane, train or motor vehicle, a handful at a time.

Where Raspail was  strikingly astute is his prediction of the immense weight of “anti-racist”  politically correct propaganda which the West has seen. He l catalogues all the politically correct grotesquery  we have today with definitive characters.   There are those in positions of authority and influence such Albert Dufort, the trendy radio journalist,  who prostitute themselves and their country by representing  the  Ganges Armada  and the other soon to be launched Third World invasion fleets, not as a threat but as a great opportunity to show their humanity.  There are those drawn from the ethnic minorities already well ensconced in French society such as the  Algerian Ben Suad (who goes by the name of Clement Dio)  whose lives are devoted to biting the hand that feeds them.  Perhaps most forlornly there are the French  young who have  had their natural tribal feeling sucked from them: “ That scorn of a people for  other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest — none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains, or at least so little that the monstrous cancer implanted in the Western conscience had quashed it in no time at all. In their case it wasn’t a matter of tender heart, but a morbid, contagious excess of sentiment, most interesting to find in the flesh and observe, at last, in action.”  Chapter 1

All of this is most impressive because when the book was written political correctness was in its  early stages.  In Britain  a couple of Race Relations Acts  had been passed in 1965 and 1968, and one worldism, especially with a Marxist tinge, was very popular in academia. But there was no general  propagandising of the British population and punishments for being non-pc about race and immigration had barely begun to get a hold on British society. Even in the United States, the most advanced of states promoting  “anti-racist” measures ,  measures such as “positive discrimination” and “affirmative action”  were still in their infancy.  The secular inquisition of individuals accused of pc “crimes” that we know today with people increasingly  being sent to prison or routinely losing their jobs  did not exist. The long march through the institutions still had a good  distance to go.

The book’s general argument that the West would be subject to massive immigration which would radically change their societies  is correct.  In Britain the last national census  in 2011 showed this for the population of England and Wales combined :

White was the majority ethnic group at 48.2 million in 2011 (86.0 per cent). Within this ethnic group, White British1 was the largest group at 45.1 million (80.5 per cent).

The White ethnic group accounted for 86.0 per cent of the usual resident population in 2011, a decrease from 91.3 per cent in 2001 and 94.1 per cent in 1991.

White British and White Irish decreased between 2001 and 2011. The remaining ethnic groups increased, Any Other White background had the largest increase of 1.1 million (1.8 percentage points).

The population of England and Wales at the time of the census was”  56,170,900 in mid-2011, with the population of England estimated to be 53,107,200 and the population of Wales estimated to be 3,063,800”. In a generation the white population, British and foreign , has dropped by 8% and those describing themselves as white British  were only 45 million out of 56 million.

There is also strong evidence that the idea of deliberately encouraging mass immigration of the unassimilable to change Western societies  has been practised by  Western Governments. Think of the words of a Tony Blair special adviser  Andrew Neather :

Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled “RDS Occasional Paper no. 67”, “Migration: an economic and social analysis” focused heavily on the labour market case.

But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.

Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche’s keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote.

This shone through even in the published report: the “social outcomes” it talks about are solely those for immigrants.

And this first-term immigration policy got no mention among the platitudes on the subject in Labour’s 1997 manifesto, headed Faster, Firmer, Fairer.

The results were dramatic. In 1995, 55,000 foreigners were granted the right to settle in the UK. By 2005 that had risen to 179,000; last year, with immigration falling thanks to the recession, it was 148,000.

In addition, hundreds of thousands of migrants have come from the new EU member states since 2004, most requiring neither visas nor permission to work or settle. The UK welcomed an estimated net 1.5 million immigrants in the decade to 2008.

In May 2014 the British  think tank Policy Exchange  published a report  on racial  and ethnic minorities entitled A portrait of modern Britain.  The headline grabbing statistic in the report is the claim that ”the five largest distinct Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities could potentially double from 8 million people or 14% of the population [now] to between 20-30% by the middle of the century. Over the past decade, the UK’s White population has remained roughly the same while the minority population has almost doubled. Black Africans and Bangladeshis are the fastest growing minority communities with ethnic minorities representing 25% of people aged under the age of five.”

Because immigrants and their descendants  have a substantially greater propensity to breed than that of the native white British population and that fact coupled with  the  much younger average age  of immigrants than that of native Britons means that the Policy Exchange projections are realistic.

What the Camp of the Saints should do is force people to accept at both an intellectual and emotional level what mass immigration represents.   It is a form of conquest,  and conquest of the most pernicious and fundamental   kind when it consists primarily of  those who cannot or will not fully assimilate into the native population. Oncesuch  immigrants are  in a country in large numbers,  the country is faced with two terrible choices:  either capitulate to the fact of  their conquest and allow the country to dissolve  into a motley multicultural mess occupying a single territory or forcibly remove the  immigrants and their descendants through expulsion or  massacre.  Nor should it be imagined that the dissolution of the country into racial/ethnic  blocs will mean an absence of war. History tells a single simple story about racially and ethnically divided territories: violence is an inevitable and ineradicable  part of such societies and the more the different groups within a territory begin to be of equal size the greater the risk of conflict.

The question which Raspail brings us to is this, is the invasion to be permitted through an excessive and fatal excess sentiment or is it to be  resisted through force, including in the final extremity the    mass killing of men , women and children,  or will the invaders be permitted to come, breed and settle the territory of the original population? Mass immigration is conquest, just as surely as an armed invasion is conquest.  A people who forgets that or buries their collective head in the political sand hoping the bogeyman will go away is doomed.

There are weaknesses in the novel purely as a literary work,  although the fact that I am commenting on an English translation should be born in mind. There is little character development, the dialogue is feeble,  the language flowery, there is a good deal of Gallic intellectual exhibitionism and a considerable amount of what I can only describe as a third person stream of consciousness.  The last I must confess is not to my taste. Raspail also gives his story a strong flavour of the leftist student protest of 1968 and the widespread attraction to the Western intelligentsia of Marxism, especially in its Troskyite manifestations.  This seems like another world today  even though the period  is only 40 odd years ago and may make the work seem alien or simply dated to some readers.

But these  weaknesses do not diminish the importance of the book, for it is  Raspail’s general  message which   matters. The message is important both because its general thrust is true and for the shameful fact that it is saying things which if expressed in a new work being offered for publication today would ensure that it did not find a mainstream publisher in the West.

If there had been no post-1945 mass immigration into Britain …

Robert Henderson

Without mass immigration we would not have ….

1.. A rapidly rising population. http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/06/uk-population-rise-ons

2. Ethnic minority ghettoes. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100047117/britains-ethnic-ghettos-mean-liberals-can-wave-goodbye-to-their-dream-of-scandinavian-social-democracy/

3. Race relations legislation, most notably the Race Relations Act of 1976. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1976/74

4. Gross interferences with free speech such as those in the 1976  Race Relations Act  and 1986 Public Order Act arising from the British elite’s determination and need (from their point of view) to suppress dissent about immigration and its consequences.

5. Native Britons being  charged with criminal offences and,  in increasing numbers of cases,  finding themselves in  prison  for expressing their opposition to mass immigration  or  for being non-PC about immigrants and British born ethnic and racial minorities.  http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/the-oppression-of-emma-west-the-politically-correct-end-game-plays-out/

6. Native Britons losing their jobs simply for beings non-pc  about  immigration and ethnic and racial minorities. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1239765/Park-ranger-sacked-racist-joke-wins-40k-compensation-tribunal-tells-council-skin-colour-fact-life.html

7. Such a virulent political correctness,  because the central plank of the creed  – race – would have been removed or at least made insignificant. Without large numbers of racial and ethnic minorities to either act as the clients of the politically correct or to offer a threat of serious civil unrest to provide the politically correct with a reason to enact authoritarian laws banning free discussion about the effects of immigration, “antiracism” would have little traction.   Moreover, without the massive political  leverage race has provided,  political correctness in its other  areas,  most notably homosexuality and feminism,   would have been much more difficult to inject   into British society.  But   even  if  political correctness  had been  robbed of its dominant racial aspect  whilst leaving  the rest of the ideology  as potent as  it is now,    it would be a trivial thing compared to the ideology with its dominant  racial aspect intact.   Changes to the status of homosexuals and women do not fundamentally alter the nature of a society by destroying  its natural  homogeneity. Moreover, customs and laws can always be altered peacefully. A  country with  large unassimilable minorities  cannot be altered peacefully.

8. State sponsored  multiculturalism, which is now institutionalised within  British public service and the state  educational system. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12371994

9. Islamic terrorism. https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/mi5-history/mi5-today/the-rise-of-the-islamist-terrorist-threat.html

10. The creeping introduction of Sharia Law through such things as the toleration of sharia courts to settle disputes between Muslims provided both parties agree. The idea that such agreement is voluntary is highly suspect because of the  pressure from within the Muslim population for Muslims to conform to Sharia law and to settle disputes within the Muslim population.  But even if it was always entirely voluntary, it would be wrong in principle to have an alien system of law accepted as a rival to the law of the land because inevitably it would undermine the idea of the rule of law and  further  isolate Muslims from the mainstream. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/10778554/The-feisty-baroness-defending-voiceless-Muslim-women.html

11. Muslims Schools which fail to conform to the national curriculum at best and at worst are vehicles for the promotion of Islamic supremacist ideas. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10777054/Ofsted-chief-to-take-charge-of-probe-into-Islamic-school-plot.html

12.  A calamitous housing shortage. http://www.jrf.org.uk/media-centre/shortage-homes-over-next-20-years-threatens-deepening-housing-crisis

13. Housing Associations which cater solely for ethnic and racial minority  groups. http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/the-truth-about-social-housing-and-ethnic-minorities/

14. A serious and growing shortage of school places, especially primary school places . http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-23931974

5. Health tourism on a huge scale http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8880071/international-health-service/

16  Benefit tourism on a massive scale. http://www.migrationwatchuk.co.uk/pdfs/BP1_37.pdf

17 . Such crowded roads and public transport. http://www.london.gov.uk/media/assembly-press-releases/2013/10/fears-of-future-overcrowding-due-to-167-million-more-london-bus

18. Such a low wage economy.  http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jan/17/eastern-european-immigration-hits-wages

19. Such high unemployment and underemployment. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/11/13/uk-employment-figures_n_4265134.html

20. Such a  need for the taxpayer to subsidise those in work because of the under cutting of wages  by immigrants.  http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/majority-of-new-housing-benefit-claimants-in-work/6521183.article

21. Areas of work effectively off limits to white Britons because either an area of work is controlled by foreigners or British born ethnic minorities, both of whom only employ those of their own nationality and/or ethnicity, or unscrupulous British employers who use foreigners and ethnic minorities because they are cheap and easier to control. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/800000-uk-jobs-advertised-across-europe–and-foreign-jobseekers-even-get-travelling-costs-8734731.html

22 As much crime (and particularly violent crime) because foreigners and British born blacks and Asians commit a disproportionately large proportion of UK crime, for example see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2522270/Foreign-prisoner-total-11-000.html

and

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/269399/Race-and-cjs-2012.pdf

and

http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/the-black-instigated-and-dominated-2011-riots-and-the-great-elite-lie/

23.  Double standards in applying the law to the white native population and immigrants, with the white native population being  frequently treated more harshly  than blacks, Asians and white first generation immigrants. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/12/07/female-gang-who-attacked-woman-spared-jail_n_1133734.html

24. Female genital mutilation. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/apr/15/fgm-first-suspects-charged-court

25. “Honour” killings. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/honourcrimes/crimesofhonour_1.shtml#h2

26. Forced marriages. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/honourcrimes/crimesofhonour_1.shtml#h2

27. Widespread electoral fraud. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10557364/Election-watchdog-demands-action-amid-fears-of-Asian-voter-fraud.html

 

We would have ……

1. A very homogenous country,  as it used to be.

2. No fear of speaking our minds about race and  immigration.

3. No fear of speaking our minds about foreigners.

4. No fear of being proud of our country and Western culture generally.

5. No people being sent to prison for simply saying what they thought about race and ethnicity.

6. Much less political correctness.

7. Equality before the law in as far as that is humanly possible.

8. A stable population.

9. Plentiful housing, both rented and for purchase, at a price the ordinary working man or woman can afford.

10. Abundant  school places.

11. An NHS with much shorter waiting lists  and staffed overwhelmingly with native Britons. Those who claim that the NHS would collapse with foreign staff should ask themselves one question: if that is  the case,  how do areas of the UK with few racial or ethnic minority people manage to recruit native born Britons  to do the work?

12. A higher wage economy .

13. Far more native Britons in employment.

14. No areas of work effectively off limits to white Britons because either an area of work is controlled by foreigners or British born ethnic minorities, both of whom only employ those of their own nationality and/or ethnicity, or unscrupulous British employers who use foreigners and ethnic minorities because they are cheap and easier to control.

15. A much lower benefit bill for those of working age.

16. Substantially less crime.

17. An honest electoral system.

BBC 2 Farage versus Clegg debate 2 April 2014

Chairman  David Dimbleby

The full debate on IPlayer can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0401ht2/The_European_Union_In_or_Out/

It will only be up until 10^th April so catch it while you can.  Here is what may be a permanent recording link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd9rsmD4HiM

The re-match between Farage and Clegg resulted in an even more humiliating hour for Clegg than the first debate. YouGov and ICM polls taken shortly after the debate had Clegg and Farage scoring as follows:

The YouGov poll gave Farage 68%, Clegg 27% Undecided 5%

As last week, this YouGov survey for The Sun questioned just over 1,000 people who viewed the debate. We weighted the data to ensure that it was representative of Great Britain as a whole by voting intention and attitudes to the European Union, but did not weight demographically; it therefore reflected the actual audience by age (older than average), gender (more male) and social class (more middle class). It was a fresh sample: we did NOT re-interview people we questioned after last week’s debate.  

It is clear that Farage gained ground most among the very people LEAST likely to support his party or his cause:

The proportion of Labour supporters saying Farage performed better rose from 42% after the first debate to 57% after the second

Among Liberal Democrats, Farage’s figures are: first debate 20%, second debate 33%

Among people who told us ahead of the debate that they supported British membership of the EU, his figures are: first debate 30%, second debate 45%  (http://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/04/03/farage-wins-round-two/)

An ICM Poll had Farage at 69% and Clegg on 31%

These  polls compare with a 57% Farage, 36%  Clegg  7% undecided  YouGov poll result after the first debate.

This was a tremendous result under any circumstances, for, as  I wrote after the first debate, it is rare indeed for such a crushing advantage to exist in  a two-horse debating race.   In the context of Clegg’s many advantages over Farage  – the profile of being deputy PM, endless appearances   before the TV cameras, widespread  mainstream media contempt for Farage and UKIP , leading a party with sixty odd seats in the Commons and, compared to UKIP, considerable financial and organisational resources plus the experience of  a public leaders’ debate  behind him – the results of the two debates are nothing short of  astonishing.  It was nothing short of an humiliation.

Why did Clegg do even worse in this debate than the first one? Many of the media commentators are putting this down to a more aggressive attitude by him and certainly his adolescent  gibes at Farage will not have helped his cause. Here are few samples:

“He’s [Farage] one of those people who see conspiracy theories everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if he tells us next that there wasn’t a Moon landing, Obama isn’t American, and Elvis isn’t dead!”

“If I’m the leader of ‘the party of in’, he’s  [Farage] the leader of the party of Putin!”

The general problem with Clegg’s aggression is that it looked, as with everything about his public persona, manufactured. The hand and arm gestures were wooden and studied to the point of being ridiculous, the voice insincere and tremulous by parts. He was a very bad advert for whoever provided his media training and an even worse one from those who advised him on how to approach this debate.

Worse of all  Clegg did what Europhiles have long done, simply chant pro-EU mantras without giving any thought to justifying them or of rebutting opposing arguments with anything more than  a bald assertion that they are wrong.  This was unsurprising because Europhiles are almost invariably intellectually lazy. Instead of doing the hard graft of mastering the facts they simply take on board   dubious assertions  such as “three million British jobs are dependent on the EU” and “the EU has prevented war in Europe” which they present not as the highly questionable opinion they are but as objective fact.

While the Europhile  ideology dominates and controls public life generally and  in particular  the mainstream media, they can get away with reciting slogans which are not only debatable but  often palpably untrue.  I dare say that Clegg has gone through his entire life until these debates without ever  having to defend  in public the subject of the EU in circumstances where he had to either produce arguments in favour of the EU  which stood up to real scrutiny or find replies to the ideas of an opponent who was radically opposed to the EU. There was nowhere for Clegg to escape to. Being unused to having to think on his feet or provide reasons other than the well-worn Europhile clichés,  Clegg simply fell back on those clichés with adolescent abuse mixed in. Often he simply repeated, almost  verbatim, what he had said in the first debate,  the most blatant and extended example occurring when the subject of  an In/Out referendum arose, viz: ‘I [Clegg] believe that when the rules change, when there’s a new treaty, when powers which rightfully belong to you are being given up to the EU, it shouldn’t be for the Government to decide – it should be for you to decide…

In contrast, Farage was vastly  more impressive in his energy, verbal delivery and body language. What nervousness there was in the first debate had vanished.  There was nothing coached about his manner.  He looked and sounded like someone voicing simple truths.

On both  immigration and an In/OUT referendum  Clegg  refused to meaningfully engage with the questions. Farage produced the LibDem poster from 2008 which Nick Ferrari had introduced into the first debate.  This had Clegg promising a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. During the first debate Clegg had claimed the poster promised  the same position he occupies now, namely, that the LibDems would support a referendum on any further Treaty which removed further substantial powers from Britain.  Farage pointed out that the poster had no such qualification of  its general promise of a referendum. Clegg waffled so blatantly at this point that Dimbleby asked him the important  unasked question  I highlighted in my account of the first debate, namely, why not have a  referendum on all that has already been passed without a referendum:, viz:  “ We last had a referendum 40 years ago. You have described everything that has happened since, the Lisbon Treaty  and all those things. Why can’t there be a referendum  on  all the things that have happened ? Why wait for even more change before you agree to a referendum, why not have one now? (Go into debate at 50 min 30 sec).  All this produced was  reiterated Clegg waffle  about waiting for a new treaty. On the face of it this is really very stupid of Clegg because he could quite easily commit the LibDems to an In/Out referendum knowing full well he would never be in a position to deliver it  because his party will never command a Commons majority. Clegg  does not do so because he is trapped by his Party’s mainlining addiction to the EU.

On immigration Farage  told the simple truth ….

‘We have no idea how many people are coming here from the European Union next year, the year after or the year after that, because unconditionally we have an open door to 485million people.

‘Immigration on this scale has changed fundamentally the communities, not just of London, but actually of every city and every market town in this country. But worst of all what it’s done socially, it has left a white working class effectively as an underclass. And that I think is a disaster for our society.

‘[Large scale immigration] is good for the rich because it is cheaper nannies and cheaper chauffeurs and cheaper gardeners.

But it is bad news for ordinary Britons. We need to have a control on immigration, on the numbers who come here and over the quality who come here.’

….while Clegg  lied and dissimulated:

 “He [Farage] claimed that 485million people were going to vacate the whole of the rest of the European continent and turn up in Britain.(This was a direct lie because Farage had already made his position quite clear in the first debate when he said correctly that 485 million had the right to come to the UK).

 “Let me just show you, this is a leaflet from UKIP. It’s a picture of a very unhappy-looking native American.

It says, “He used to ignore immigration, now he lives on a reservation.” We are not – by staying in the EU – going to be cooped up on a native American reservation. What are you going to say next? That you’re Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull?”   (Farage said that he had no knowledge of where the leaflet had come from and disowned the message).

Clegg’s dishonesty on immigration was shown vividly after Farage  quoted a Migration Watch report that immigration to the UK  over the next four to five years  would mean ,  even at its current rate, the building of a city the size of Manchester  which has a population of 500,000. Clegg said this was nonsense because the Greater Manchester area had 2.7 million. Clegg must have known that Greater Manchester is not Manchester and consequently  deliberately tried to mislead. Clegg also repeated the falsehood  from the first debate that  UKIP’s claim of  29 million Bulgars and Romanians  who could come to Britain was absurd because there are  not 29 million Bulgars and Romanians.  The 2012 census figures for both countries  show they have  is a combined population of more than 28 million. Why Farage did not thrust the census figures at Clegg is a mystery.

When Dimbleby pressed Clegg (Go into the recording at 22 min 46 sec) on the  effect of massive immigration on infrastructure such as schools and  hospitals Clegg responded hesitantly and  incoherently  with “There are always problems when you have people”.  Dimbleby was palpably  surprised and he asked Clegg what he meant.  Clegg waffled on about how there would be such problems whether or not Britain was in the EU.

Clegg was positively  shameless when Farage raised the matter of Clegg’s claim in the first debate that only 7% of  legislation going through Parliament was inspired by the EU. Farage produced a copy of the House of Commons Library note which Clegg had relied on and read out the passage which showed that that the HoC paper note was much more nuanced and undogmatic and gave estimates of its own of between 15% and 50% percent of UK law from all sources . (http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/briefing-papers/RP10-62/how-much-legislation-comes-from-europe) .

Clegg tried to wriggle out of being caught  in what to any normal human being would count as a straight forward lie by referring to the 6.8% primary legislation figure quoted by the HoC note. However, as Clegg must have been well aware there is a great deal of  EU inspired law which consists of statutory instruments (the secondary legislation which provides the mechanics to implement primary legislation). Farage called a spade a spade, viz: “You are lying willingly to the British people about the extent we have given away democray”.

Inevitably Farage was taxed with his remarks about admiring Putin as an operator. However, this rather backfired because  both Dimbleby and  Clegg manifestly misrepresented Farage as being a general admirer of Putin  and Farage used the opportunity  to not only  expose that misrepresentation (which gained him the sympathy of the audience)  but to lambast Clegg as one of the cabal of career politicians who had kept Britain interminably at war:

Farage: “I don’t admire Putin, what I said was, he’d outwitted and outclassed you all over Syria. I also said I didn’t like him as a human being and I wouldn’t want to live  in Russia.’

 “You were absolutely hell bent on getting involved militarily in the war in Syria and I personally am delighted we didn’t go to war in Syria.

“This country has had enough of getting involved in endless foreign wars, there is no evidence that our intervention is making life better. I don’t want to be part of a European foreign policy.”

Farage’s strictures against the British political elite’s  warmongering got the loudest applause of the night. (Britain has de facto  been continuously at war for nearly a quarter of a century starting with the first  Gulf War).

Another strong Farage showing was on energy, viz: “The Chinese and Indians have gone for coal on a scale we can’t fathom, the US has gone for shale and we have gone for wind energy.” He  warned that the European Union’s “unilateral” approach to climate change was damaging businesses by pushing up energy bills and driving energy greedy industries such as metal smelting to the wall  and concluded that Britain should  “Scrap wind energy, scrap the subsidies, get shale”.

Farage also pointed out  that many leading politicians who were significant landowners had  benefited from the wind industry.

Clegg response was to call for more renewables to prevent e “over reliance on oil and gas from Nigel Farage’s friend Vladimir Putin”.

The final question from the audience was “What will the EU be like in ten years?”

Clegg said that he thought it would be much as it is now, which tells you how far his head is buried in the sand. In ten years three scenarios are more probable than the present status quo,  namely, a federal super state,    a free trade area or it will have simply disappeared..

Farage  foresaw a Britain outside of the EU after a referendum, hoped that other countries in the EU  would also leave  and warned against the dangers of  violence if change in the EU could not be achieved by democratic  means, pointing to support for nationalist parties such as Gold Dawn in Greece as evidence of the frustration which was building:

“We see in Madrid, we see in Athens, very large protests, tens of thousands of people, a lot of violence.

“You take away from people their ability through the ballot box to change their futures, then I am afraid they tend to resort to aggressive means.”

Clegg’s thoroughly shoddy performance did not help his case but the prime reason why  he was beaten so comprehensively was the simple  fact that he has a thoroughly bad case to argue.   It is impossible to make a sound case for being within the EU on any grounds which are acceptable to either  the British public now or which accord with what politicians from all the main Westminster Parties have claimed since Britain became part of what is now the EU.  For over forty years British mainstream politicians have repeated the sordid, treasonous lie that no real sovereignty  has been given away and that  Britain is still a fully functioning  Parliamentary democracy. The naked lie has been modified over the decades as the loss of sovereignty became ever more apparent  to the casuistry of saying Britain has not lost her sovereignty but merely pooled it with other countries. The more adventurous Europhile fantasists or liars (take your pick) say  that by joining with 27 other EU states British sovereignty has been amplified.

In addition,   the Labour, Tory and LibDem parties still  claim that Parliament is  sovereign because in principle Parliament can refuse any  legislation put before it or simply repeal any legislation relating to the EU up to and including the Act which gave  power to the Treaty of Rome, the European Communities Act of 1972. The reality is that even where the  national veto on EU law has applied it has very rarely been used – and is now very restricted because most EU decisions are made these days  by qualified majority voting – and there has been no instance in over 40 years of Parliament rejecting legislation introduced because of the EU. Practically, British sovereignty has been a dead letter since Britain joined the EEC.

The audience reaction throughout  was decidedly interesting, both because of its consistent support for Farage and for the fact that the BBC had not done their usual and packed the audience to reflect Europhile views. This could either be because a strategic decision has been made by the BBC that they will move with the political wind and allow Eurosceptic views on air  because to do anything else would be too blatantly biased as public interest in and anger about the EU grows or simply because they could not find enough unquestioning Europhiles applying to be audience members . I suspect it was the latter because not only is Europhilia growing more and more unpopular, even many of those who say they support the EU often have a considerable dislike of certain EU issues such as uncontrolled immigration and the imposition of regulations which interfere minutely both with business and the intimate details of their private lives.

The two debates told  us is this:

That the British are deeply dissatisfied with  their  political class.

That the British want an IN/OUT  referendum on the EU

That the British deeply dislike the EU as it is whether they are in favour of leaving or not

That for the British  immigration  is a prime political issue, probably  the prime political issue

That the British detest the perpetual  liberal internationalist warmongering

That Clegg is a very empty vessel indeed .

It remains to be seen whether the  British political class will respond to what the British people want . On the evidence of  the past 40 years don’t hold your breath.

LBC Nigel Farage versus Nick Clegg EU debate 26 3 2014

Chaired by Nick Ferrari

(The full debate can be viewed here http://www.lbc.co.uk/watch-lbc-leaders-debate-live—26th-march-87667)

Robert Henderson

Farage walked the debate with a YouGov poll of 1003 people giving this result:

57% Farage

36% Clegg

7% undecided

Even that figure probably understates the size of the victory because YouGov weighted the data to in practice favour Clegg by assuming UKIP supporters would be disproportionately likely to watch or listen to the debate:

1,003 completed this survey between 8.00 and 8.10. We weighted the raw data to (a) the voting intentions in our latest regular daily poll for the Sun (Lab 37%, Con 35%. UKIP 11%, Lib Dem 9%) and (b) to our most recent data on whether the UK should remain in the European Union.

An alternative approach would have been NOT to have corrected the political skew among our original 3,000 sample. The argument for doing this is that any assessment of audience reaction should take the audience as it is – in this case, accepting that UKIP supporters were much more likely to watch or listen to the debate than supporters of other parties. Had we done this, I estimate that the verdict of the audience would have been Farage 65%, Clegg 28%. Those who prefer to cite this figure, rather than to adjust for the UKIP-rich nature of the audience, are of course free to do so. ( http://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/03/27/farage-wins-debate-clegg/)

It was also telling that many of those who were not UKIP supporters thought Farage had won, viz:

Not surprisingly, almost all UKIP supporters preferred Farage. But he was also considered the winner by: 

• 69% of Conservative supporters
• 42% of Labour supporters
• 20% of Liberal Democrats
• 30% of those who said before the debate they would vote to keep the UK in the EU  (Ibid)

 

It is rare in a two man debate on any subject for a win to be so crushing and that is doubly so when politicians with  such polarised views are put up for the judgement of the public.

Why was the result so emphatic? Well, negative messages are always a very  hard sell. Clegg’s   position was one of fear and mistrust of Britain and Farage’s one of confidence in his country.  Clegg was selling the message “Britain isn’t up to looking after itself”, Farage the message  “ Britain could and should be independent and sovereign”.    While Farage was saying things such as “Surely the benefit system is for the citizens of this country” , The Anglo-Saxon rule of law”  and “The best people to govern Britain are the British”, Clegg  was tedious ly  intoning  “We get more power rather than less by being part of an economic superpower “ and  talking about the ill effects of “pulling up the drawbridge “ to exclude immigrants. (Clegg spent a great deal of time worrying about  drawbridges being pulled up).

Farage also displayed much more energy in his delivery than Clegg,   who as ever sounded like a prefect ineptly playing the role of a weary adult before  a school debating society. He was  deeply irritating for that reason alone, but his whole persona seemed manufactured, from  the deeply wooden arm gestures he makes  to the studied use of questioners’ names.    Farage  was perhaps  too shouty at times and  weak in his responses to some important questions, such as failing to explain how UKIP’s claim that  75% of British laws are being made in Brussels was calculated. But he  had one massive advantage over Clegg: he was able to tell the truth all the time or at the least not tell deliberate lies.  Farage at least seemed like a real human being, with unmanufactured  body language,  and if he allowed his ill-temper to intrude, judged by  polls such as the YouGov one,  it must have seemed like justified irritation with the British political class as represented by Clegg  to the majority of those watching and listening.

Clegg’s wilful dishonesty is perhaps best exemplified when the subject of immigration from the EU came up. Clegg referred to a recent UKIP pamphlet which claimed that Farage had claimed that “29 million Romanians and Bulgarians” were coming to Britain. This was untrue said Clegg because “They’re aren’t even 29 million Romanians and Bulgarians in Romania and Bulgaria”.  Apart from  not being what UKIP had said  – the party had simply pointed out that 29 million would have the right to come to Britain –  as of 2012 Bulgaria had a population of 21.33 million and Bulgaria 7.305 million, 29 million bar a few hundred thousand.( https://www.google.co.uk/#q=population+of+roumania). Not that it would have mattered in they were a million or two short of 29 million. The point at issue was the existence of millions of people from countries with living standards a fraction of those in Britain who were now entitled to come here.

Unlike Clegg , even when he was making a bit of a mess of things Farage  attempted to answer questions directly even when they raised real difficulties for him.  For example,  a question from the audience raised the subject of  the trustworthiness of politicians and  cited the LibDems’  broken promise over tuition fees and Farage’s employment of his wife as a paid helper as examples of things which destroyed trust.  Clegg failed to explain why the Lib Dems had broken their promise and just waffled about the importance of  trust,  while Farage answered the question directly  by saying the responsibilities of leading the party meant that he  needed someone on tap at home to help him. He also denied that he had ever said publicly that he would not employ his wife.   On another occasion the subject of UKIP’s opposition to gay marriage came up and Farage again dealt with a  potentially very tricky question by simply saying that UKIP would review the situation if the threat of European judges imposing  gay marriage on religions was removed.

Farage was generally  very forthright  and nowhere was this shown to better effect than when he attacked the  EU’s interference in the Ukraine’s dispute with Russia.  This naturally caused  a tempest of  politically correct huffing and puffing after the debate and clearly appalled Clegg. Such forthrightness will  have appealed to most of the general public who are sick of politicians presenting weasel words to them.

Clegg  shamelessly trotted  out the tired old discredited Europhile mantras because any Europhile true believer really has nowhere else to go. These included

–          3 million  British jobs are at risk if Britain leaves the EU  (After Ferrari had intervened to say there are  questions marks over the research on which the claim was based,  Clegg tempered his bald statement by saying  it would not be three million but it might be  two million, one million, 500,000 and so on ).

–          Immigrants are a boon to Britain and pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits (Farage pointed out that Migration Watch recently demolished this argument http://www.migrationwatchuk.co.uk/press-release/380)

–          Britain needed to be in the EU to get the best trade deals (Farage pointed out the Iceland had recently negotiated a lucrative trade deal with China)

–          The European arrest warrant is allowing Britain to  extradite murderers, terrorists and paedophiles  (Farage pointed out that it was a grotesque breach in the protections for the individual provided by  British law )

–          One and a half million Britons live and work in other EU countries and if Britain does not have freedom of movement within the EU then those one and half million  Briton  will be put in jeopardy.  (Farage missed a trick here. Apart from the fact that forced expulsion of EU foreigners  from Britain or Britons from other EU countries is wildly improbable, he should have pointed out that the British  living in other EU countries are  likely to either be someone doing a skilled job or be retired with money, while the EU foreigner  in Britain is likely to be doing a low skilled or unskilled job. Hence, if it did come to a forced exchange of Britons abroad for EU foreigners in Britain,   Britain would be the material  gainers. )

The Lib Dem leader also had a new statistic to play with, namely, that only 7% of British laws come from Brussels (patently  absurd because the massive range of supranational competence the EU now has).  Clegg said the source was the Commons Library and did not qualify in any way his claim by, for example, by saying it was difficult to quantify and only a broad range could be offered.   The 7% turns out to be false.  This position is much more complicated. Here  is what the 2010 HoC research paper entitled How much legislation comes from  Europe says:

“EU regulations, unlike directives, are not usually transposed into legislation at national level, but rather into quasi-legislative measures, administrative rules, regulations or procedures etc which do not pass through a national parliamentary process. How, then, can one be worked out as a proportion of the other? The term ‘national obligation’ might be more appropriate, but is it possible to identify the sum of national obligations arising from EU laws? Increasing use of regulations, particularly Commission regulations, “decouples national transposition procedures” (Christensen), thereby increasing the unquantifiable element of EU activity. All measurements have their problems. To exclude EU regulations from the calculation is likely to be an under-estimation of the proportion of EU-based national laws, while to include all EU regulations in the calculation is probably an over-estimation. The answer in numerical terms lies somewhere in between the two approaches, and it is possible to justify any measure between 15% and 50% or thereabouts. Other EU ‘soft law’ measures under the Open Method of Coordination are difficult to quantify as they often take the form of objectives and common targets. Analyses rarely look into EU soft law, the role of EU standard setting or self-regulatory measures.”

And

“In the UK data suggest that from 1997 to 2009 6.8% of primary legislation (Statutes) and  14.1% of secondary legislation (Statutory Instruments) had a role in implementing EU  obligations, although the degree of involvement varied from passing reference to explicit  implementation. Estimates of the proportion of national laws based on EU laws in other  EU Member States vary widely, ranging from around 6% to 84%. (file:///C:/Users/robnefrt/Downloads/RP10-62%20(2).pdf)

You can take your choice between Clegg shamelessly  lying or Clegg being stitched up by researchers who supplied him with false information.

In this context, it is very  important to understand what  Statutory  Instruments  (SIs) are. They provide the mechanism by which primary legislation is implemented. Frequently, SIs will expand the remit of primary legislation  beyond what is envisaged by those drafting the primary legislation and the politicians who vote for it. The “gold plating “ of EU directives is largely accomplished through SIs. Consequently, to concentrate on primary legislation stemming from Brussels is grossly misleading. The fact that SIs relating to EU derived primary legislation are not routinely   scrutinised by Parliament makes the opportunity for greatly expanding the powers of the primary legislation. It is worth describing  the Treaty obligations which place horrendous limitations on British sovereignty:

1 Types of EU legislative acts

There are three types of EU legislative acts. Under Article 288 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU):

A regulation shall have general application. It shall be binding in its entirety and directly applicable in all Member States.

A directive shall be binding, as to the result to be achieved, upon each Member State to which it is addressed, but shall leave to the national authorities the choice of form  and methods.

A decision shall be binding in its entirety. A decision which specifies those to whom it is addressed shall be binding only on them.

Opinions and Recommendations have no binding force.

EU Legislation  Standard  Note SN/IA/5419   http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN05419.pdf

On the question of a referendum on the EU, Clegg squirmed as he tried to represent the LibDems as  having a consistent position from the time when he promised a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty  in 2008 until now.  There was an element of farce about the way the discussion began when Clegg answered  a question  (go into recording at 8 minutes 33 secs) from Ferrari about a Lib Dem poster  of 2008 which seemingly promised an unqualified  referendum by saying that people could not read the small print. Clegg actually meant that they literally could not read the small print of the poster Ferrari was holding up to the audience and cameras,  only the headline.  There was a ghastly serendipity about this,  because whatever Clegg meant  he then made very  clear there was indeed small print surrounding any LibDem promise of a referendum.  Clegg said  that in 2008 his position was exactly the same as it is now,  namely, a referendum should be held if there were substantial powers taken away by further treaties.

Farage picked Clegg up on this very strongly, pointing out that if only powers taken away by Treaty would trigger a referendum, this might well be a dead letter because  there was a strong possibility that new treaties would not be forthcoming  (this could well be the case because so much is decided by Qualified Majority Voting now) and that in any case there is a constant drip drip drip of new EU legislation which whittles away sovereignty, some of it substantial such the expansion of the EU’s foreign policy and the EU’s attempt to control the City of London. Clegg had no real answer to this.

Frarage should have asked Clegg to  explain why the British people could not be asked (in an IN/Out referendum) about all the powers which had been taken away without any referendum over the past forty years. Sadly the question went unasked.

It has to be admitted that Farage was weak in answering some  questions on statistical detail. The two worst instances were the proportion of British laws which originate from Brussels – when asked where the 75% UKIP figure came from Farage feebly said it was their own calculation with out explaining how they had reached it – and  on the cost of the EU to Britain and.  Ferrari asked Farage to justify the £55 million a day cost in a UKIP pamphlet.  Farage fumbled his reply by failing to make clear immediately that it was the gross amount  paid and taking too long to explain that even though it was the gross amount what money Britain received back had to be spent as the EU determined . However, I would doubt whether such statistical lacunae would register significantly with the general public, who will have largely switched of their minds when politicians start hurling stats at them.

After the debate the  politically correct media and politicians flapped around after the thumping poll win for  Farage claiming variously  the result was unimportant  (absurd), it was score draw, (http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2014/03/the-room-spun/) or that in reality Clegg had won (utterly fantastic).   This might have been expected from the likes of the Guardian and Mirror, but the supposedly Eurosceptic   Daily Telegraph also had a full hand of regular commentators – Mary Riddell,  Dan Hodges, Tim Stanley,  Toby Young – who all , with varying degrees of enthusiasm, stated that Clegg had come out ahead  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10725571/Verdict-who-won-in-the-Clegg-v-Farage-debate.html). The widespread  dismissal of  the YouGov poll by the mainstream media and politicians encapsulated the inherently anti-democratic mentality of those with power and influence in Britain.

The debate  was not deeply penetrating nor did it address all the important EU  issues adequately, for example,  the loss of democracy resulting from the UK’s EU membership  was barely touched upon.  Nor was it clear why the subject of gay marriage was raised within a debate on the EU unless it was simply to try to embarrass Farage and UKIP.  No matter. The value of the debate lay in giving the British public an opportunity to express their feelings through polls such as the YouGov one cited above  and  its naked demonstration, in the form of  Clegg,  of the chasm between the l public and the British elite.  Most of the British public display the natural human instinct of wanting their own national interests to be protected by their own people; the British elite wish to either submerge Britain into a united states of Europe or labour under the pathetic  delusion that the imperial tendencies of the  EU can be restrained from within.  Faced with a choice between Farage and Clegg it was no contest; they plumped for someone who shared their natural instincts.