Gagging Bloggers in the UK

The House of Lords is considering things read here.

How Sinister EU Power Cuts Across UK's Traditional Right-Left Divides

My latest posting to International Business Times  may be read from here.

Dim outlook for independence from EU puppet masters

A person who publishes a small-scale blog!

The Government amendment to the Bill instituting State Control of the Freedom of Speech has replaced an amendment as suggested by Lord Lucas and replaced it with an undefined reference to a person described as in the title to this posting, read here.

There can be no clearer indication that the plan of this truly quite evil Coalition Government is to shut down bloggers mentioning the UK across the entire globe and instill fear amongst those endeavouring to pass independent comment on the activities of these weak and pitiable politicians.

A commenter to this blog, when I suspended blogging here because of this threat, expressed the opinion that Cyprus was a graver threat. Although theft of all our monies is a terrible thing, I retain the belief that the threat to our freedom of expression is even worse. It is absolutely clear that such is what the Government of Cameron and Clegg is now about, all those assisting them should be thoroughly ashamed.

Another link for comment on this is from Big Brother Watch linked here.

State Gagging of Blogs

Here is a message for members of Britain's House of Lords, debating State Gagging of Bloggers today:

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO CYPRUS OVERNIGHT, COULD HAVE BEEN IN LINE SOON FOR THE UK HAD INDEPENDENT BLOGS, (such as Ironies and Ironies Too, for over ten long years) NOT RAILED NIGHT AND DAY AGAINST THIS TYRANNICAL EURO PROJECT!

WE SHOULD BE THANKED, NOT GAGGED!

IMF appear to have abandoned the Troika

Initial reports on the overnight "supposed" rescue package for Cyprus, including the press statement given by IMF Managing Director Mme Christine Lagarde, appear to exclude that organisiation from immediate participation in the deal to save Cypriot banks agreed in Brussels overnight. The €10 billion forthcoming is thought to be some €7Billion shortfall from the #17 Bilion widely accepted as the amount necessary to prevent a collapse in the island's economy!

Eurogroup Statement on Cyprus 25/3/13 in pdf

A Statement made by Mme Lagarde, played on BBC World Service radio at 0500 GMT, made no mention of any IMF involvement in this latest rescue package for the now clearly doomed European Common Currency, the Euro!

Update BBC report with Lagarde statement video

UK Government and Internet Control

The Wikipedia profile of the Minister apparently responsible for the internet is linked here, Ed Vaizey.  He has a background with "Establishment" running right through him as if he were a stick of rock. He reports to a Maria Miller, read here, her picture does not instill confidence in the area of backbone, she has the look of a junior pre-school kindergarten helper!

Before resuming normal blogging, I am awaiting clarification on the recent legislation on State Control of the media in Britain. Whether I am prepared to put my own family's potential financial well-being at the risk of the words of people such as these, or those above them in this disgraceful and appalling administration, will then still remain to be seen.

Ironies Too & UK State Press Controls

An early version of the proposed legislation covering the UK Press, as circulated last week, was clearly a dagger aimed at the very heart of blogs such as Ironies Too. It stipulated digital publications mainly aimed for the UK public or concerned with UK affairs would be covered within its ambit.

A provisional look through the proposals agreed and passing through Parliament yesterday in such a bizarre and extraordinary manner, seem to not cover this blog, written in France and published by Blogger in California, but until I am certain of that fact I will not be posting here.

The events over Cyprus indicate how today governments seem prepared to take actions without the benefits of enabling legislation, such that even the most law-wbiding of citizens can thus be put at risk of inadvertantly breaking a law of whose very possibility they may have been completely unaware. There is enough written on this blog already to fully explain the motivations of why those now in power seek to achieve such a result, fear of the truth of their own actions and pasts being revealed so demonstrating their true motivations, filth indeed, as I have often felt compelled to summarise!

The Bill for Decades of Delusion, Deceit & Decadence is Presented

The story of the EU and its failed currency the Euro will be determined today and throughout this week, not in the powerful financial centres of Hong Kong, Singapore, Frankfurt, Zurich, London, New York, LA, Sydney and Tokyo but at millions of individual ATM and bank desks throughout the EU.

Can the corrupt and decadent EU elite who have created this disaster rely on their media control and spin to disguise their act of theft that they plan to undertake in Cyprus at midnight tonight? Can they manage to get their citizens to leave their savings and monthly salaries available for similar acts of seizure all across the EU, or will huge volumes of money in idividually tiny portions begin to migrate to secret places in hundreds of millions of homes?

If the latter, will then the same governments that trashed that currency, make it too worthless by withdrawing it from circulation?

Good luck to us all!

Bank Run Fear as Depositers Scalped in Cyprus

Reuters reports linked here, on the scalping of ordinary savers in Cyprus by the EU authorities, (increasingly desperate to save their political project of the Euro and now clearly prepared to stop at nothing in an attempt so to do,) seem instead to have sealed its fate this Saturday morning!

The last thing these blinkered idiots could have desired was headlines regarding potential bank runs!

Where is there a safe haven for ordinary ciitizens savings in the monstrous undemocratic beast these people have created? Yet the conclusion to that report's first paragraph is as follows "despite the risks of a wider bank run."

Given that the British Government itself is part of this secretive regime, are even sterling deposits in English banks now safe from the demands of ever more cash for this voracious and bankrupt monstrosity that EU has become?

The Coalition Government in its actions over HS2 and elsewhere daily demonstrates it is completely subservient to the diktats of Brussels. All three of Britain's main political parties are now themselves almost completely reliant on EU disbursements!

Presumably only in Germany can EU citizens feel complacent over the sanctity of their savings, as elsewhere debts have mounted to giddying sums in a vain attempt to satisfy the infinite demands for supposed but unachievable European Unity.

Imposing the German Way across the Globe

Are we right to fear German Hegemony?

The cover of this week's New Statesman certainly seems to wish to alert its readers and newsstand browsers to such a possibility with this week's edition reproduced here:

The agreed "Conclusions" to the European Council Meeting of last evening, available in pdf format from this link, make absolutely clear how the Teutonic Juggernaut has been able to merely roll over and completely disregard PM David Cameron's pointless attempt to make an impact by removing Britain from the EU "Compact for Growth and Jobs" note this passage from the main summary:

"The European Council had a comprehensive discussion on the economic and social situation and set the orientations for the economic policy of the Member States and the European Union in 2013. The focus should be on the implementation of decisions taken, in particular as regards the Compact for Growth and Jobs."

Note here the melange created amongst the supposed separate and different involvements of the 17 slave-states of the Euro Group, the 26 EU Compact victims and the now apparently irrelevant but actually Treaty defined 27 actual Member States.

The giant corporations that run German industry, having Europe now they clearly believe, fully under their control; are turning their main attentions  elsewhere, witness these three very recent examples of one such, Siemens, interests and influence within the USA:

Siemens feted at the State of the Union address by President Obama 24th January 

Video from Fox News with the CEO of Siemens US Corporation on a meeting on Cybersecurity with President Obama at the White House 

Video from Bloomberg TV where the interviewer Peter Cook has the courage to ask CEO Peter Spiegel, what is the deal between Obama and Siemens!

In Europe of course, Siemens, is one of the more obvious German Giant industrial concerns, as it is for that companies useless High Speed Trains Europeans' countryside is widely being ripped apart at huge cost, for journeys those most affected by the devestation will never be able to afford to make nor have the need so to do. 4G investment would be far better spent but of little return to German heavy industry.

The High Speed rail lines remind me a bit of Roman roads, all leading to the useless and corrupt centre, in the case of the EU Brussels, rather than Rome, not for the use or convenience of the people along the route, but for the rapid movement of the forces necessary to ensure the peoples continued subjugation!

Peter Cook, the Bloomberg interviwer in the latter link, tweeted in advance of his report, if any tweeters had suggested questions for Siemens' Siegel, I suggested he ask whether Siemens were the real victors of World War Two?

"This House" by James Graham a 'MUST SEE'!

I have not been blogging for the past few days as I needed to take some time off to see the National Theatre production of the play "This House" by James Graham which portrays the parliamentary skullduggery of the nineteen-seventies.

The general disinterest to that destruction of our democracy by the general British population to those disgraceful events was aptly portrayed by an apparently supefluous pop group loudly strumming away beyond the dominating presence of the face of Big Ben in a magnificent set that enhanced the cleverly written plot.

I left England as a result of these shenanigans and went to work in the USA. That the Labour Party was able to revive itself from those disgraceful years and once again conspire to trash the nation under Blair and Brown is a damning indictment of the utter unfitness and general stupidity of the tribal British electorate.

In the interval I had the misfortune to stand in line at the water and ice-cream stall alongside Jack Straw. Scruffily dressed in a manner that if seen on a tube platform might cause one to select a different door, on suspicion of mal-odour, he represented a fitting symbol at that very theatre of the degradation that he and his ilk have brought upon Britain!

I hope as many as possible will make the effort to see the play, even the snow covered difficulties of a Normandy and Channel crossing could not make my visit seem unnecessary, for these MPs of all parties were the ones, who as a Scottish MP makes clear in the dialogue, destroyed our nation and centuries of struggle and endeavour that was sacrificed by our forebears in building it!

What Constitutes the Sickening Scum Spread across the Summit of British Society

So Vicky Price, (former wife of Chris Huhne, ex Energy Minister, MP, MEP and groomed professional politician throughout his life within the same process that has delivered over us almost the entire gang of present political leaders,) is also with her "ex"; guilty of "perverting the course of justice".

The clutch of emails between this vindictive bitch and a so-called news journalist working for the Murdoch rag, the Sunday Times, speaks volumes on the nature of these sewer rats and their entire political and media class, who have while feeding their own disgusting greed and other as yet unkown appetites, absolutely destroyed this country's society alongside its democracy and independence, through the blackmailing and extortion racket that is the EU.

Let us now see how that same British Society chooses to sentence these creatures, long years in jail with no remission seems appropriate, but the country is reduced to such straits, can that really be afforded?

How can we rid ourselves of their shallow, lightweight, similarly corrupted, fellow-travellers spread all across the political parties? They are indeed just like a foul green scum of algae spread all across the surface a deoxygenated garden pond.

 I will blog again only when the sentenceson this pair  are at least known and when any new official attitude towards the filth that now control all the details of our entire lives can possibly be disecerned.

A Sordid Scrap over unearned Loot

What a prospect looms before us as the EU Commission spurred on by the slothful and grotesque MEPs of the democracy destroying European Parliament set to cross swords over the bankers bonuses regulations, while the world's real economy disintegrates and the political construct of the Euro imposes mass unemployment across Europe and from there leaking out across the globe.

What gruesome dregs of humanity thes people truly are, who can take sides at the ghastly spectacle of naked avarice and mendacious materialism. All we ordinary folk can do is hope it ends soon, hopefully in mutual self-destruction and that some trustworthy means of exchange will soon be returned to us.

My post of yesterday on Monopoly Money, unwittingly did say it all!

Time to pack up the Monopoly Box

The game has nearly run its course, we have run out of houses and hotels and everywhere is overbuilt and over borrowed, the nominated banker is the clear winner, but he sits mostly on a pile of other players' IOUs, all as worthless as the scrap paper we wrote them on, and in fact even the real game money with which we started to play. Monopoly was only fun and enjoyable as a game when some trust existed among the players.  Often that was not the case, but eventually all would eventually twig that the banker (often allowed to self-select at the outset,) has had his hand in the joint kitty, sometimes even since play began, then as play ended all would often swear that none would play with him ever again. So much for memories of childhood Monopoly games!

In the supposed real world, where our politicians, public servants and bankers have been similarly dishonest and turned our earnings and savings to worthless and meaningless tokens of nothingness, read here.

Farage, having betrayed British eurosceptics is unfit to lead UKIP

Stephan Shakespeare in a column in CityAM this morning had a line that rubbed plenty of salt into the still smarting wounds of last week. So stung did I feel, it put me off posting any blog on here right up to this late hour of the day.The very true but striking words on the Eastleigh by-election, were these:

Ukip came in second, but as the only credible anti-establishment party, they might have been expected to win (and surely would have done so had Nigel Farage been bolder and stood himself).

Farage was much to be seen on TV all day yesterday. Nothing he had to say offered any rational explanation for his refusal to run at Eastleigh, another than the greed to take the obscene amount of pay, pension and perks he has been pointlessly accruing for what now seems like decades.

All those fighting words and ringing statements of his quite clearly really stand NOW for NOWT!

I feel betrayed, even though I for one have long had and often expressed such doubts. I feel betrayed, how must ordinary members of UKIP feel who have put in the hard slog for zero returns year, after year after year.

When else will there be a chance such as that offered by the fates in Eastleigh this February ever again?

I was going to turn to other topics this morning, such as the hope offered to all European democrats by the words and actions of Beppe Grillo in Italy over the weekend, but I have been thrown off-track by this deep betrayal on the part of UKIP's leader Nigel Farage, and the YouGov executives pithy reminder of the circumstances.

How ironic it will be if Senor Grillo succeds in bringing the rotten EU to its end, the European Parliament is thus dissolved and Farage is left seatless and pensionless. What a missed chance he would then have had to guide events and play a part in restoring Westminster's Parliament to its proper place in our nation's affairs. All that opportunity, pride and integrity has been lost; for he lacked the courage and political nous (in spite of my repeatedly urging) to grab the huge prize which Eastleigh, as all can now see, quite clearly offered, preferring instead to stick within the corrupt bounds and pampered privilege of Brussels.

Your Gas Bill How High Can It Go?

 My IB Times posting on how Governments and the EU are effectively taxing your warmth:

Natural Gas - Even Keeping Warm is Ripe for EU Extortion [BLOG]

By Martin Cole: Subscribe to Martin's RSS feed 

I imagine that international consciousness of the fact that water is indirectly delivered from the heavens for free initially prevented the  despots of what became the EU from attempting to tax delivery of that precious and life-giving resource.

The early years of the coming together of Europe's nation states in a progressive community, dedicated to delivering Marxism disguised as the mixed economy, also happened to coincide with the conversion of the northern tier of western European from town gas produced from coal to natural gas tapped, as fresh water often is, from beneath the land and increasingly from beneath the sea.

In even medium-sized British towns, smelly gasworks advertised their presence by large and highly visible gasometers. They were steadily replaced by vans converting every street to North Sea gas. Gas lights spluttered their welcome pools of light every quarter of a mile or so into the Devon countryside as I cycled home from boy scouts, running to a halt when I still had over a mile to continue, with only the stars (unfiltered by any orange sodium glow) and the glow-worms in the high hedgerows to keep me safe from the bogeyman, in whom, of course, I no longer believed

These were the days before even British Gas, itself now supposedly replaced in the public mind by the villainous Centrica whose latest price gouging is neatly encapsulated in the statement that it "raised tariffs 6 percent for around 8.4 million households at the end of 2012. Operating profit for the segment rose 11 percent to £606m."

The Gas Council ran things in those days with some rather quaint financial structures, as I experienced when working for a US oil company developing the North Sea oilfield Beryl.

After leaving the UK in the Wilson/Callaghan years, disgusted at the blatant and deliberate attempt to undermine, if not sabotage, the North Sea oil industry for ruinous point-scoring dressed up as "participation", I spent some time working in the US. Here, my ultimate employer was a natural gas transmission pipeline company, regulated (quite properly) as a public utility, down to the finest detail of our corporate accounts.

Before leaving Britain, I had seen the British Gas Council, in the shape of Sir Denis Rooke, make possible the country's conversion to natural gas to the benefit of the consumer and a maximum return to the oil industry investors of 20 percent AARR, the industry minimum for offshore exploration to be viable. For the last 20 years I have looked on in horror at how this supply of warmth to the cold northernmost countries of Europe has been manipulated to extract revenue in a manner reminiscent of the means by which the euro is now being used to bring austerity to those beyond the reach of such warmth extortion.

In the process, our civil service has been bent to an extent that must have Sir Denis not just turning, but writhing in his grave.

There cannot be a wholesale gas price index set by giants engaged in the business. Only full government right of audit and prohibition of cross-border transfers can achieve what national and EU politicians claim is a regulated market.

This is not some new fact. It has been known and recognised in the US in law for years. There can only be one reason that that is not the case within the EU - companies and/or regulators are making unjustified profits, presumably leading to some individuals somewhere receiving rake-offs.

 Martin Cole runs several politically themed blogs, mainly Ironies Too, and tweets and comments about the erosions of liberty

Ten years of Blogspot Blogging

Last month marked my tenth anniversary with Blogger, now a part of Google. I had of course been digitally trying to impose my views on complete strangers well before that.

A post that somehow best sums up this apparently pointless decade of time wasted at the keyboard, (just as my first blog post was published on Samizdata as linked within the body of the following comment) was strangely also not first published by the now mere subsidiary of Google, but by IB Times last Monday. It is here and covers the Italian election, which seems to indicate it would have been better had I properly grasped that language and continued to blog from there!

Italy at the Polls: Time to Say 'Stop' to Tyranny

By Martin Cole: Subscribe to Martin's RSS feed

February 25, 2013 11:24 AM GMT

On 16 November 2011 an outrage occurred within the European Union, the stain of which may perhaps only now start to be erased by Italian voters this very weekend

The EU, in circumstances which are not yet fully revealed, removed the democratically elected Prime Minister of one of its founding and largest member states, whilst that state was at the forefront of a mounting existential economic crisis. The victim of this Prime Ministerial dismissal, Silvio Berlusconi, has subsequently claimed that the crisis itself was the consequence of the actions of another EU founding member state and/or of the EU Commission itself. It was indeed a former powerful member of that appointed body who stepped into the departing Prime Minister's shoes and governed the country, mostly through similarly appointed apparatchiks.

The individual installed, Mario Monti,and the man he replaced have both faced the Italian electorate this past Sunday in a General Election, where voting continues this morning, with exit polls expected by mid afternoon this Monday. Frontrunner at present is a former Communist, Pier Luigi Bersani, while a large protest vote is expected for dark horse anti-EU candidate and blogger, Beppe Grillo.

Ten years ago, when I felt compelled to begin my own blog because of the non-democratic direction in which the EU was headed and directly owing to clear censorship of its own controlled Europa internet discussion forums, I wrote this commentary, linked here, (co-incidentally enough written from Italy) warning that the member states then framing the new constitutional treaty for the entire EU stood at a crossroads between tyranny and democracy. As we all can now see far too clearly, they lamentably, deliberately, chose the former route.

Replacing the Italian Prime Minister, following on from the horrors in Greece and promissory note deception with Ireland, has been the clearest possible evidence that such a tyrannical course, (as defined by Karl Popper) was indeed the one selected by those in real control of the EU in the intervening decade.

Italy in its elections this weekend has a major opportunity to send a signal that such a course is no longer acceptable to the citizens of twenty-seven once-democratic nations.

As I suggested in my original critique, a way ahead, even in today's excruciating economic and non-democratic aftermath of that particular wrong turn, is still quite possible - thanks mainly to the fantastic democratic opportunities now offered by the internet revolution.

How much longer will these petty tyrants who run the EU close their eyes to the direct democratic example that lies at the heart of their continent? For over one thousand years the Swiss have fine-tuned their division of powers between four linguistic groups and among differing cantons as numerous as the EU's present member states.

As far as humanly possible they have probably achieved in their Constitution a division of power which is as close to perfect as can possibly be attained - yet each day we go about our business in growing chaos as if such an example did not even exist, let alone on(e) in our midst. Matters devolved to the re-affirming member states of a renewed democratic European Union in one pan-EU referendum could thenceforth be determined by direct keyboard vote.

The citizens of Europe are increasingly sickened by both the non-audited corruption in EU expenditure and the non-democratic nature of both the Commission and some of its institutions. The structures and procedures of the so-called Parliament are demeaning, both to Europe's electorate, as evidenced by falling votes, and the calibre of its elected members.

People will rid themselves of such control one way or another - let us hope the Italians, who have much indeed to feel bad about, have shown the rest of us a way ahead in their present General Election.

Martin Cole runs several politically themed blogs, mainly Ironies Too, and tweets and comments about the erosion of liberty

  

Well, as all now know, the result made Grillo's party the clear winner and the EU machine is now busily manouevering to neuter the clear will of the Italian people. I will try to resist, but I will probably be here at my keyboard, blogging away as these things unfold - we shall see!

Mr Therm a Square Deal for Energy on Tap

My latest posting to IB Times on a much visited topic of this blog, the natural gas pricing rip-off, is now online and may be read from here.

After writing the comment I thought again of the supply of gas in the old days and turned up some old advertisements which I linked in a couple of tweets yesterday afternoon. One is repeated below, as putting into context just how far removed we now are from a "Square Deal" for our "heat-on-tap". Let me repeat the pledge from the gas manufacturer:

"A THERM of gas is a State-established measure of heat as definite as the pound or yard. The therm is your guarantee of the cheapest heat-on-tap and a square deal all the time"

 Are there any in the country, or indeed across the EU who would now believe such a pledge? Perhaps indeed there are, seeing as how UK voters re-elected the shadiest most pro-EU party of all at the Eastleigh by-election.

I truly despair for my country and its people, well and truly both sold down the river and thrown to the wolves by the complete charlatan politicos clearly now in control charge of all its contending political parties!