Wednesday, August 4, 2010

The Most Influential Right Wing Journalists

Conservative Home also asked in Centre right for our opinion on the most influential right wing journalists. In journalists we are reminded that the written pen and now they typed article can be extremely influential. It is also where you can see the right wing is heading in the UK is heading and the fault lines within it. I have included no one in the sun here namely because for me the Sun is not exactly the home of excellent journalists. I now this sounds snobbish but it is just my view.

Here are my 4 most influential journalists; I’ve not done it on name recognition alone:

1. James Dellingpole- in his editorials in the spectator and elsewhere, he has been busy debunking climate change alarmism, whilst showing the brittle evidence Anthropogenic climate change is based on. This has become particularly relevant after the climate gate incident at East Anglia University.

2. Simon Heffer- Whether you oppose or support Heffer's criticism of Cameron, no one can say you cannot see his influence of a new editorial tone from the telegraph, which is increasingly critical from the right of David Cameron.

3. Bruce Anderson- One of the few writers in the independent who hasn't been infected by the leftist bias. Whilst he remains, the Independent hasn't completely abandoned living up to its name the Independent " that’s to say being a paper which has no political stance and has journalists of all political perspectives". He has also written some very good articles in defence of David Cameron.

4. Alistair Heath- The editor of CITY AM who also contributes to the spectator, has been one of the few defenders of capitalism, free markets, low regulation, low taxes and the city of London, when others have given up. Whilst he now may be a single person, he will provide I believe the intellectual depth to defenders of capitalism in the upcoming years

Influential tory backbenchers.

Conservative Home through its centre right blog asked an interesting question after making a few suggestions of their own about who have been the most influential Conservative backbenchers.

Conservative backbenchers have become increasingly important in general since the advent of the coalition government. This is because as David Cameron has been increasingly sidling up to the Liberal Democrats, many on the backbenchers have felt that they have being ignored.

They point to the issues of the EU where the conservatives in their general election manifesto said they would be doughty defenders of British interests, yet the reality has been when in government they have put into law the European External Action Service which should now been known by the moniker the EU diplomatic corps, which many believe due to its sheer size and scope will undermine an independent UK foreign policy. Then their was the opting into the European Investigation order, which has undermined the UK's judicial independence, and handed over our judicial and police powers to the EU. This seems more pro EU rather than eurosceptic, and therefore there is no wonder that conservative backbenchers have been unhappy about this.

There has also been the ill judged attempted emasculation of the 1922 committee, when Cameron tried to put conservative government ministers on to it and was forced to back down, as well as an ignorance of any policies coming from conservative backbenchers.

This is why in my view Conservative Home's question is more important than ever. It is also important in my viewpoint as the conservative backbenchers now represent the grassroots of the party like myself who at times feel disenchanted by the coalition government who at times seems very unconservative.

My choices were as follows:
I think Tim Montgomerie who runs Conservative Home forgot one big name who has been tirelessly fighting for the Tory right and has stood up for his eurosceptic principals whilst being a doughty defender of his constituency. He also highlighted channel 4's positive discrimination policy. This man is Phillip Davies.

Another person is Graham Brady who has been doing a brilliant job in his 1922 committee of defending the rights of conservative backbenchers who otherwise would have had a much harder time having their voice expressed.

Then there is Christopher Chope who successfully defended the rights of the 1922 committee not to be emasculated by the conservative elites. He is also running an effective yet under the radar campaign against the AV referendum. He has also along with Phillip Davies and others been involved in getting second readings on some of his private members bills such as the UK sovereignty bill, which the government if they had the choice wouldn't like to debate.

Jacob Rees Mogg has been a breath of fresh air with some excellent speeches, he's clearly very independent minded also. His budget speech was great, reminding us who had caused the mess, Labour and why capitalism is still the answer.

However for his defence of Britain against the EU and good work in the culture, media and sport select committee. For my view it has to go to Phillip Davies. He might not get much attention, but he is one of the most respected and influential backbenchers in my humble opinion.

Monday, August 2, 2010

The European Investigation Mad, Bad and Dangerous - Therefore the Coalition signed up to it.

The European Investigation Order literally makes my blood boil. It is one of the most illiberal and undemocratic orders issued by the EU, which will squeeze our liberties even further, and surrender more of our sovereignty. We could have opted out of this terrible scheme, we could have stood up for Britain's interests. So what did this coalition government do which promised us that our liberties would be protected, and no further sovereignty would be surrendered to the EU well quite clearly from the message here, they did exactly the opposite, they have opted in to one of the most authoritarian pieces of legislation going and smashed up a key promise of theirs to protect liberty and protect sovereignty.

That we’ve opted can be seen by Baroness Neville Jones in the House of Lords speaking on behalf of the government and Theresa's May statement in the House Of Commons. There wasan option to opt out, but following the British government policy of capitulating to the EU demands it decided to opt in. Apparently if we do not like the policy we can opt out later, but the pessimist in me believe I'll see that happening when pigs fly. When after was the last time a government got powers back from the EU? from my recollection not since the heady days of Thatcher re-negotiating our budget contributions in the mid 1980s.

We have lost even more control of our judicial and police activities to EU member states and in particular other EU member state's police forces where for example in countries such as Bulgaria police brutality is common. So in one full swoop our police activities will become ever more brutal, as they now will be forced to bring in Bulgarian Style Justice, to meet with the requirements of the European Investigation Order. After all when the Bulgarian police order the British Police to investigate a crime, under the European Investigation they will have to. No wonder Fair Trials international is so opposed to the European Investigation Order. Considering the other countries in the EU who have signed up to the European Investigation Order, its hardly going to lead to a less brutal police force and a fairer justice system.

The European investigation order will work hand in hand with the European arrest arrant which came into law after September 11th to supposedly to protect us from terrorists but has actually not protected us from terrorists, but instead undermined many innocent people's rights to a fair trial and protection from extradition. UK citizens can be extradited to other countries to be arrested for minor cases-as happened with Andreas Symou when he was arrested by the Greek authorities for a crime he didn't even commit. Thus showing that this alone had led to massive abuses of the freedoms of British citizens.

The European investigation order takes this even further at a time when we ourselves as the Ian Tomlinson incident showed and the powers given by RIPa to police - worry us that we have given to much power to our own national police, which has led to abuse and a lack of protection of UK citizens from what is becoming increasingly a police state, this makes the situation much worse.

This is because now police authorities from other countries now have these powers, they have the power to spy through our bank statements, to look through other data, and they can do all this by making simple requests of British police which the British police must I repeat must obey, in other words it is an order not a request. There data safeguards are even worse than ours- so there is on a greater scale more chance of our data going missing and our privacy exposed, and further more us the average British citizen not just being spied on by British police but by European police. Truly the next story about Bins and surveillance will be Foreign Police rummaging through our Bins.

In doing all of this we hand over our police and judicial powers to the EU, which has a very bad history of undermining member state's liberties, due to its consistent undermining of sovereignty. The European Investigation Order is an example of this where the EU's attempted harmonisation of police and judicial policy across the EU has put liberty in danger and put values such as innocent until proven guilty into jeopardy.

Apparently this doesn't break the coalition government's non-existent referendum lock, which said if there was any attempt of significant extension of EU powers would trigger it. Theresa May and Baroness Neville Jones had the bare cheek to say to Lords and MPS who opposed the European Investigation Order and thought it was a significant transfer of sovereignty of getting it all wrong and not understanding what the European Investigation Order was about. Im sorry ladies but the problem they know all to well about what the European Investigation is about. Given all this, and that it is a significant transfer of powers to the EU, we should according to the coalition government have a referendum on the subject. I'm still waiting for the referendum, I fear it could be a long wait.

The duplicity goes even further than this I’m afraid though. The government through a House of Lords statement in the 15th of July said they wanted more scrutiny of EU laws etc and EU work, and that it had been lacking in the last parliament. Yet the European Investigation Order has been railroaded through parliament, from orders upon high from our political masters the EU. No proper debate was allowed and there was no vote on such a substantial piece of legislation, even though more time to debate was called for by amongst people like Dominic Raab MP in the house of commons and Lord Stoddart in the house of lords. The coalition government just like New Labour is in danger of saying one thing and doing exactly the opposite.

Oh and all the bureaucracy which will be created will mean that we the taxpayer gets to pay for the privilege of losing our liberties, as the EU will probably say to meet the demands of the European Investigation Order there will have to be an increase in the EU budget and thus our contributions will skyrocket even further.

Supposedly this coalition's government was to stop further powers going to the EU and in fact repatriate powers from the EU to the UK in particular the UK parliament. Additionally the coalition government was supposedly committed to protected UK's citizen’s individual freedoms. In opting into this law, the Coalition has shown that for all their words, when push came to shove, they preferred to let our liberties wither away at the altar of the EU, rather than stand up for the national interest and protect our hard won liberties which has been earned over centuries.