Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

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Who cares. Just a silly story that appeals to the usual suspects.

None so blind as those who refuse to see an EU mess

Angela Merkel's visit and the Somerset Levels floods highlight how this country is in thrall to policies demanded by the European Union



David Cameron welcomes Angela Merkel but got little joy over EU reforms from the German Chancellor Photo: FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA/EPA


Christopher Booker
By Christopher Booker

4:29PM GMT 01 Mar 2014


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10668708/None-so-blind-as-those-who-refuse-to-see-an-EU-mess.html


Last week brought two more glaring examples of what – it is time we came to recognise – has become one of the most alarming features of British politics. This is our extraordinary inability to understand the realities of the strange, all-pervasive form of government that now rules so much of our lives, thanks to our membership of the European Union. One example was summed up in those headlines that greeted David Cameron’s meeting with the German Chancellor. “Merkel dampens Dave’s EU dream,” said one; “Merkel dashes hopes for overhaul of the EU,” ran another.


Nothing should have been remotely surprising about this encounter. As I have often tried to explain here – ever since Mr Cameron came up with his notion, a year ago, that he could somehow hope to negotiate a new relationship for Britain with the EU, then put it to a referendum in 2017 – every point on his wish list was just pie in the sky. It defied every bedrock principle of how the EU works: that, once powers of government are handed over to Brussels, they cannot be given back; that, under Article 48 of the Lisbon Treaty, he would never get the required majority from 27 other countries allowing him to negotiate; that the tortuous procedures now laid down for such a new treaty could not possibly be completed by 2017.


In other words, those millions of words that in the past year have been spoken and written by pretty well every politician and pundit one can think of have been devoted to discussing something that could never possibly have come about in the first place – as Mrs Merkel confirmed on Thursday.


Another, very different, example of the same phenomenon has been the public hoo-ha over how and why parts of England, including my own county of Somerset, have lately been subject to abnormal floods. As again I have been trying to explain in recent weeks, these floods were not just an unfortunate act of nature. They were deliberately made much worse by a major shift of government policy, designed to put the interests of wildlife and “biodiversity” above those of people, homes and businesses.


This new policy has been driven at every point by a plethora of EU-funded study groups and EU legislation. It is impossible to understand what has happened without some knowledge of the EU’s 1992 habitats directive, its water framework directive of 2000, its 2007 directive on the management of floods; and a mass of policy documents that show how, in parts of Britain, specifically including the Somerset Levels, the intention has been to “increase flooding” in the interests of nature and the concerns of “green” lobby groups, heavily funded by the EU, including the WWF, Friends of the Earth and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.


Yet when, on Wednesday, MPs spent three-and-a-half hours solemnly discussing the floods in the House of Commons, not one of the 25 who spoke showed the slightest knowledge of this EU legislation. The only mention of the EU came from a Labour front-bench spokesman, calling for Brussels funding to help towards paying for the damage, which, as she seemed wholly unaware, had been largely brought about by the EU’s own policies.

Virtually the only senior politician who does understand this is our Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, who wishes to see a complete reversal of the policy that has caused this disaster: first, by dredging those deliberately silted-up rivers, then by putting the management of flooding on the Levels back in the hands of those local boards that kept them properly drained for generations.

But when, on Thursday, an array of local organisations met to discuss the plan Mr Paterson has asked for, the key part played by EU legislation in the flooding was scarcely mentioned. An alliance of the Somerset county council, the Environment Agency and green lobbyists, all of whom have received millions of pounds in funding from Brussels to shape and implement EU policy, looks ominously like winning the day, to the point where any hope of reversing that policy and preventing a repetition of this disaster begins to look pretty forlorn.

So, as with Mr Cameron’s dreams of “winning back powers” from a “reformed EU”, the elephant in the room yet again remains hidden from view. Until we find a way to reach some grown-up understanding of how this shadowy form of government actually works, we are doomed to stumble on like helpless children from one folly to another. We must remain as bewildered as was our Prime Minister on Thursday, when Mrs Merkel politely kicked over the little house of cards that has been at the centre of his “European policy” through all this past, wasted year.

Cameron pokes the bear

Strangely enough, among those who could be said to have played a part in the events leading up to the current, worsening crisis between Russia and Ukraine is David Cameron.

Few remarks in the past year can have rung louder alarm bells in the Kremlin than his hubristic boast in Kazakhstan last July that he looked forward to the day when the European Union would stretch “from the Atlantic to the Urals”.

No one with any knowledge of history could have imagined that the EU’s lengthy wooing of Ukraine would not be looked on by President Putin as highly provocative, to a country that has been accustomed to looking on Ukraine as its own backyard and Russia’s “soft underbelly” through much of the past millennium. Just as many eyebrows might have been raised at Mr Cameron’s parroting of that ironic mantra blazoned over the European Commission’s website: that the EU wishes to see Ukraine ruled by genuine democracy, free from corruption and with “sound public finances”.

These noble aspirations have been similarly echoed by Baroness Ashton, posing as the “high representative” of an unelected form of government that has itself become a byword for corruption, has not had its accounts signed off for 20 years because of their countless “irregularities”, and that has been responsible for indulging in the most obviously “unsound” currency experiment the world has ever seen.

http://civilusdefendus.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/4-stages-of-islamic-conquest/

Full-time work for parents has dried up under David Cameron's Government
Mar 02, 2014 07:00 By Vincent Moss

Some 646,000 youngsters live in homes where one or both parents are only working part-time – up from 443,000 in 2010 when Cam became Prime Minister

GettyBad for families: Cameron
The number of children living with parents who cannot find full-time work has soared by nearly half under the Coalition Government, figures reveal.

Some 646,000 youngsters live in homes where one or both parents are only working part-time – up from 443,000 in 2010 when David Cameron became Prime Minister.

The figures from the Office for National Statistics will embarrass the Government, which launched a child poverty strategy last week.

And they reveal a different side to the falling jobless total, which now stands at 2.34million.

Shadow Treasury Minister Catherine McKinnell said it showed ministers are ignoring the concerns of ordinary families.

The Labour MP said: “These figures show how much tougher life is for families under David Cameron’s Government.

“Labour will back families and help to make work pay.”



http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-camerons-government-caused-full-time-3197874#ixzz2up1POZDj
Follow us: @DailyMirror on Twitter | DailyMirror on Facebook

Revealed: The civil servant in the Home Office’s PIE funding inquiry and his academic articles on boy love.

If this theory is borne out, then the Daily Mail’s vendetta against Harriet Harman, Jack Dromey and Patricia Hewitt will fade into insignificance; the suggestion here is that, through a senior civil servant, successive governments including that of Margaret Thatcher (who the Mail loves so stridently) funded the Paedophile Information Exchange using taxpayers’ money – a far, far more serious issue.




Revealed: The civil servant in the Home Office’s PIE funding inquiry and his academic articles on boy love
Posted on March 1, 2014 by David Hencke


A former top civil servant who later went on to write academic articles on the love between men and boys in ancient Greece and in Benjamin’s Britten’s operas is at the centre of a Home Office inquiry into whether he sanctioned taxpayers’ cash to fund the Paedophile Information Exchange.

Clifford Hindley, who died some five years ago, was head of the Home Office’s Voluntary Services Unit from at least 1979 until 1983, which is now under investigation after a former civil servant has alleged there may have been a ” cover up ” over a grant re-application from PIE.

Reports in Exaro News and The People reveal today that the Home Office inquiry under permanent secretary. Mark Sedwill is examining recollections from the whistleblower that when he raised questions about why the Home Office should fund such an organisation Mr Hindley brushed this aside and asked him to hand over the paperwork. This happened around 1979 and 1980.

This has raised the question - as the whistleblower thinks it was a re-application -whether the Callaghan Labour and Thatcher Conservative governments actually funded PIE just at the time when the National Council for Civil Liberties was also supporting the organisation, Such a decision would be far worse than the present row going on between the Daily Mail and Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, over her role at NCCL. It would mean that taxpayer’s cash has been given to fund paedophiles.

The whistleblower originally contacted Tom Watson MP who passed him on to the Home Office.
Last night Tom Watson said: “It’s a remarkable state of affairs and the Home Secretary must make sure a ­report is presented as soon as possible.

“If the allegations are true, it shows how insidious an organisation PIE was that they could even convince the Home Office to give them taxpayers’ money.”

Investigations by Exaro revealed that Mr Hindley, an assistant secretary in Whitehall, holds degrees in classics and philosophy from Oxford University and a degree in theology from Cambridge.

Exaro has also found articles and book contributions written by Clifford Hindley after he retired for academic and music magazines – all entirely on same sex relationships between men and boys.

His contribution to the Cambridge Companion on the composer Benjamin Britten is entirely on emphasising the love relationships between boys and men in his operas – a view that is challenged by other experts on Britten. as too extreme.

He has also written articles on the Greek historian and pupil of Socrates, Xenophon, again entirely on love between men and youths – either in the army or in society.

Ian Pace, a lecturer in music at City University, where he is head of performance, and a researcher said: “It is very hard to deny that there are pederastic themes in some of Britten’s operas, most obviously The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice (mirroring such themes in the original literary works of Henry James and Thomas Mann respectively); and arguably also in Peter Grimes and Let’s Make an Opera (The Little Sweep).

“Some of Hindley’s writings on Britten certainly show a strong interest in such pederastic elements.”

An example is his description of the relationship between the ghost Quint and the boy Miles in the Turn of the Screw.

Hindley writes: “‘Quint is not a monster but one who opens fascinating new opportunities to the imaginative boy. Also fundamental is the fact that their relationship is one of homosexual love. It is presented as an emotional and mutually responsive relationship, in which the physical element is barely hinted at. It is nevertheless a bond of the kind rejected by conventional society’.”

The Home Office were not giving anything away about the inquiry – though it sounds as though documents – particularly from the Thatcher era – appear to be missing on anything to do with PIE.

At the moment a search is on to find out whether a dead man files will disclose a highly damaging fact that the vile organisation the Paedophile Information Exchange was actually funded by the government.

This is all pointing to THATCHER.

For those who want a balanced view and informative article regarding the the problems in Crimea:

The crisis in Crimea could lead the world into a second cold war

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/02/crimea-crisis-russia-ukraine-cold-war


Would advise Manuel not to read it, as the words are probably too difficult and maybe his concentration is not up to it.

at the moment, i do not pretend to understand quite what is going in ukraine .... i have no idea who actually fomented the current unrest, as assuredly it was not spontaneous

certainly the russkies are a bunch of bully-boys, though in some ways, uk reacted similarly in the falklands

on the other hand, what is the affiliation if any of the new guys who have taken over?

until it becomes a little clearer, i shall take no sides, but nevertheless, there is no doubt that the current situation is destablising at best

Europe is on the brink of war but.....Goldfinger is more bothered about knocking Mrs Thatcher .......it's unbelievable.....pages of it.....cracked !....(if you want a good laugh)(if that's possible in these dire times)...try and read through it...

From my post 37190 (before the escalation in Crimea) re Labour grandees involvement with P.I.E.
''perhaps if they were Tories and not Labour this board would have seen a deluge of posts from the usual red brigade''.
Not a word from gf about the 3 Labourites, a bit different now there may be a Tory involved.
2517

absolutely so, though i still think it's just a rather unpleasant smear campaign

RF.

I think GF is responding to the "delight" that some had in muck raking and smearing by association.

One of the political charms of the Mail and adherents, is its use of innuendo of politicians who have different views.

Unfortunately, this mode of "debate" has increased and it is no surprise that retaliation is in a similar vein.

-whether the Callaghan Labour and Thatcher Conservative governments actually funded PIE just at the time when the National Council for Civil Liberties was also supporting the organisation,

The Callaghan Labour party . Did you miss that Goldie

I tell you one thing : a JKX (based in the Ukraine) short might be on the cards !...shame because it's a good little company....

Its mostly Gas that is exported to other countrys , and Russia can turn the pipe line off

RF isnt it strange you blues all want to go quiet when the tables are turned on you.

Fact is Thatchers involvement with PIE was far more serious than the 3 labour MPS involvement.

Like I said when boots on other foot the tory boys run away and go into hiding.

By the way RF this isnt the first time you have made personal nasty snipes at me. Ive tolerated them so far and responded in good faith.

But remember this you shouldnt say things on the net that you wouldnt say to a persons face.

it really is extraodinary how a few of you plankheads remain transfixed with some non-event bit of scandal surrounding a few non-event uk politicians when thje ukraine situation couid evolve into something far more serious for all

little things obviously pre-occupy little minds

I'm not making snipes at you : just look at your blogs Goldfinger....nothing but indoctrinated Labour adverts...I'm sorry but your monopoly of this thread wrecks any kind of normal debate on other subjects...most selfish !..