Saturday 3 April 2010

Saturday 27 March 2010

Labour's Soviet Britain


A New Labour Anti-Social Behaviour Victim's Champion

Labour are wittering about their latest "pledge card" which will detail the promises they're most likely to break if they ever get a sniff at power again. It's the usual airy-fairy meaningless stuff that no one will ever be able to prove one way or another. But one aspect caught my eye -

In an attempt to empower victims of antisocial behaviour, the prime minister says they will be entitled to take out civil injunctions, funded by the local public authority, if the police are not taking action within a set time.

"People have got to know if they have a real complaint they will get a fast response, and ultimately if they feel they have not been given satisfaction, they will be able to take a civil injunction themselves and that will be paid for by the authority."


Right, so let me see if I've got that right. Some local neds pan your window in and you report it to the police. They come round, investigate it, compile a report for the CPS or the Procurator Fiscal who evaluate it and decide if a conviction is likely etc etc. But, if you get bored of waiting, you can launch a civil case paid for by council tax payers. Or if the police point out that you never saw who broke your window and they can't arrest the ned across the road just because "he looks well shifty innit" you can launch your own prosecution.

Lovely. Expect the courts to be stuffed full of "He said, but she said and I said" cases in no time. Which will result in greater backlogs of cases, more people getting fed up and launching civil cases. All paid for by Council Tax Payers.

Then there's this little gem -
Labour is also planning to install champions for victims of antisocial behaviour in every local authority.
What? Is that like Block Wardens then? Is this a fancy pc term for the old babushkas who kept an eye on tenement blocks in Soviet Russia, reporting anti-party behaviour to the State?

Tell you what, here's a better idea Gordon. Use the police we have. Let them do their jobs of patrolling the streets and deterring by their presence, instead of being used as personal bodyguards by politicians terrified of their own constituents and keeping a permanent thin blue line around Westminster.

Link


Jury Team are calling for the public to be given a referendum on introducing army-style punishments for offenders. I daresay that will have far more of an effect on anti social behaviour than Gordon's intention to bankrupt councils and logjam the courts.

Referendum Link

Saturday 20 March 2010

Salmond - a national embarrassment


Ye can tak oor dignity, but ye canna tak oor subsidies


I see Alex Salmond has been shooting off at the lip prior to the SNP conference in Aviemore. The forthcoming General Election does indeed offer opportunities for Scotland. A hung parliament means a disproportionate amount of influence falls to smaller parties. As the Ulster Unionists demonstrated, such power can reap great rewards for constituents.

So it really made me cringe to see what Salmond intends to do in selling Scotland's influence. He wants MORE public funding and geegaws. For a pocketful of gold he'll bend in the wind to his English paymaster and ever perpetuate the image in English eyes of Scots being grasping, avaricious and shallow. It's not a nation stepping forward to grasp independence that Salmond wants, (the SNP have shown they are unable to motivate enough Scots to support the cause), he wants to stir up resentment and disgust of Scots in England to the point that Scotland is repelled into Independence, a pariah state on the British mainland.

At a time of belt-tightening and cutbacks, when all but the most moronic socialist simpleton knows spending must be cut, it is truly abhorrent to see a Scottish First Minister with the begging bowl out demanding "MORE".

BBC LINK

Tuesday 9 March 2010

Jury Team - The Immigration Question

One of the anomalies of having something great is that you may want everyone to know you’ve got it, but if everyone knows about it then they may want a part of it. And if this happens too much then the real value can become rather seriously diluted.

Such is the case with the enormous privileges granted to us by our being British citizens. It is worth being proud about what this affords us. Little wonder that such privilege has attracted the attention of the rest of the world. Advertise a bargain sale on the television and the queues stretch around the corner for that store the next day. And so it is becoming with the offer of British Citizenship for immigrants entering Britain. Result: services get stretched to their limit and what was once valued and valuable to the 60 million or so people of this country, now cannot cope with the excessive demands placed upon its diminishing resources.

With that in mind, and considering that official figures show that immigrants being granted British Citizenship has increased by a colossal 200,000 in the past year under this Labour government, has the prized possession of citizenship and all it affords in this country become tarnished and poorer because of this?

In light of this pressure on diminishing resources, the Jury Team proposes the amount of time adult immigrants must be resident in the UK before they can claim an entitlement to full British citizenship (and therein those rights granted to every citizen) should increase from the 3-5 year as it is now, up to 10 years. Rather than being an easy result, an applicant with a genuine wish to achieve British citizenship would be tested to properly ascertain the required education and be required to prove their record is void of any crimes (http://tinyurl.com/Citizenship-10).

According to Migration Watch, a respected calculator of these numbers, the levels of migration have increased by a colossal 58% from the previous year (http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/)!

The Jury team believes this ‘open-door immigration’ policy has become a revolving door of issues under the current Labour government, scared to address an issue until it (typically) becomes too late to do anything about it. The Jury Team consider this as another form of Westminster ignorance, failing to acknowledge the incumbent issue of immigrants viewing the short-term qualification (as little as just 24 months) as a platform to live in Britain as they choose and receive automatic government benefits. The UK is the only EU country providing automatic, free medical healthcare; our European counterparts present a cogent policy of acquiring sufficient medical insurance before entry. This seems wholly sensible and therefore the Jury Team suggests making private medical insurance mandatory for non-EU citizens obtaining visas intending to be in the UK for a period of more than three months (http://tinyurl.com/Non-EU-Medical). The resultant saving to the NHS of £4billion a year could be spent better on those who are already the good citizens of Britain, and the value returned to that cherished position that it provides everyone.

Saturday 13 February 2010

UK Afghan Troop Deaths Are 12 times European NATO Allies

One of Jury Team’s key policies is that British troops should not be put in harms way more than the the troops of other NATO countries. NATO “remains the cornerstone of UK defence policy” according to the Ministry of Defence. However NATO is meant to be a co-operative endeavour among its 28 members and if the UK is not specifically threatened then there should be no reason for it to play more than its fair part and to put its troops in greater danger.

An analysis being published today shows that British troops have been dragged into the Afghan war far more than any other NATO country. We have more troops there, compared with population, than any other NATO country including America.

Compared with the size of the UK, we have had 12 times more deaths than our European NATO allies since 2006 when the army was redeployed to Afghanistan and John Reid, the Defence Secretary at the time, famously said that “our boys” might leave in three years “without a shot being fired”.

In fact during 2006-9, Britain had 240 troops killed but Germany had only 19 deaths and Italy only 16. The total deaths of troops from Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal, with a combined population of 273 million, more than 4 times the UK, has been only 76, less than a third of the number of UK fatal casualties. This means that per head of population, Britain has suffered 12 times fatalities more than its supposed NATO allies and has suffered nearly double the U.S.A.

This new analysis is taken from the latest troop numbers posted last week on the website of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan which is run by NATO on behalf of the United Nations.

The Jury Team policy is to “Limit the number of British troops sent to Afghanistan to the average number sent by other NATO countries (relative to their population)”. This would mean that instead of 9,500 troops in Afghanistan, the UK would have only about 4,000. We would still be fulfilling all of our NATO obligations but would also be saving at least £2 billion a year.

Jury Team policies are based on what the British people want. The political class have become out of touch with the electorate. As a result of vested interests and electoral cowardice, the current party system does not deliver the policies that people want. The traditional political parties do not even properly debate the issues. Using its own review substantiated by a series of YouGov opinion polls, the Jury Team has researched the areas where the political class and the public have clearly different views. Jury Team will legislate for those policies and then have an authorising referendum before they become law.

The Jury Team policy on Afghanistan was shown in a YouGov poll to be supported by 67% of the electorate to 14% against. There was particularly strong support from females (71%) and from those aged 55+ (75%).

The following table shows the latest available (1st February 2010) number of troops deployed in Afghanistan by all 28 countries of NATO as shown on the website of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) which is run by NATO on behalf of the United Nations:



Troops

Population

Troops Per Million

Deaths 2006-9

Deaths Per Million

United Kingdom

9,500

61,634,599

154.1

240

3.9

United States

47,085

308,181,734

152.8

689

2.2

Denmark

750

5,511,451

136.1

26

4.7

Netherlands

1,950

16,486,587

118.3

21

1.3

Estonia

150

1,340,415

111.9

7

5.2

Norway

500

4,799,252

104.2

3

0.6

Canada

2,830

33,880,270

83.5

130

3.8

Latvia

175

2,261,294

77.4

3

1.3

Bulgaria

540

7,606,551

71.0



Albania

255

3,639,453

70.1



Croatia

295

4,435,056

66.5



France

3,750

64,351,000

58.3

31

0.5

Belgium

575

10,665,867

53.9

1

0.1

Germany

4,415

82,002,356

53.8

16

0.2

Italy

3,150

60,053,442

52.5

19

0.3

Poland

1,955

38,135,876

51.3

16

0.4

Lithuania

165

3,349,872

49.3

1

0.3

Slovakia

240

5,412,254

44.3



Romania

945

21,498,616

44.0

8

0.4

Czech Republic

440

10,467,542

42.0

3

0.3

Slovenia

70

2,032,362

34.4



Hungary

315

10,030,975

31.4

2

0.2

Turkey

1,755

71,517,100

24.5

2

0.0

Spain

1,070

46,661,950

22.9

8

0.2

Luxembourg

9

493,500

18.2



Portugal

105

10,627,250

9.9

1

0.1

Iceland

3

319,368

9.4



Greece

15

11,260,402

1.3



TOTAL

83,007

898,656,394

92.4

1,227

1.4

AVERAGE



62.4


0.9




The table is in the order of the number of troops per million of population. It can be seen that the UK has the highest number, 154 per million, of any NATO country. In contrast France, Germany and Italy have a ratio of only 58, 52 and 52 per million respectively. The average of this ratio for all NATO countries is 62.4 and if the UK moves to this ratio then it will lead to a 60% reduction, about 6,000, in the number of UK troops deployed, saving around £2 billion from the defence contingency budget. These 6,000 would amount to about 7% of the current total NATO forces deployed. This could be made up by further troops from other countries or by reducing the area covered or the rate of training of the Afghan army. Professor Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute, the military think-tank, has already said it would be feasible for 'the total size of the commitment to go down to around 5,000 by 2012'.

The table also shows the number of deaths in Afghanistan up to the end of 2009 for troops of the various countries since 2006 when NATO was redeployed. Tom Coghlan said in The Times in January 2010: 'The force levels now being deployed show the catastrophic miscalculation that was made before the original deployment of 3,300 British soldiers in 2006; with the famous hope of John Reid, the Defence Secretary at the time, that they might leave in three years 'without a shot being fired' '. It can be seen that at 3.9 deaths per million population, the UK has a death rate slightly higher than Canada and much greater than the US. The UK death rate per million population is the highest with the exception of Denmark and Estonia, whose forces both suffered from serious isolated incidents, and is more than 10 times that for the troops from Germany, France and Italy.

If there is a threat to the West then every country of NATO should be deploying its troops similarly. However there seems no reason why the UK should provide more than its fair share of troops to the NATO campaign in Afghanistan. This Proposal will limit the number of UK troops to the NATO average (relative to population) although for operational reasons during handover periods the government would be allowed to exceed this limit by 10% for up to three months.

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