Toby on Tuesday

'The Age Of Endeavour' 

Last week we had some fun with Germany’s Euro Information and its EU version of the Olympics medal table which placed “European Union” at the very top and with Great Britain nowhere to be seen.   Let’s start today with a bit more fun and this revised medal table:

1.  Commonwealth – 58 Gold, 65 Silver and 51 Bronze, Total:  174

2.  United States – 39 Gold, 36 Silver and 33 Bronze, Total:  108

3.  China – 23 Gold, 18 Silver and 26 Bronze, Total:  67

And here in our corner of North Yorkshire the Commonwealth means an immense amount to us, for this was the birthplace and home of the hugely brave and gifted Captain James Cook, without whom the Commonwealth as we know it would never have existed.   Born in 1728 at Marton, he was raised at Great Ayton before becoming a merchant navy apprentice at Whitby.   So began his his astonishing career during which he mapped much of Canada, especially Newfoundland, and then made his three great voyages of exploration to the Pacific Ocean.   During these, he mapped the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, while also making the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand.   The rest, as they say, is history, but James  Cook’s personal qualities of courage, patience and good sense should not be forgotten.   And what is astonishing is that so many members of the Cook family still live and thrive in this constituency and still possess those qualities that made him great.

Now where all this is significant is that Brexit gives us the chance at last to restore our Commonwealth links and to rebuild our identity as an outward-looking maritime people once more.   When we joined the European project, we were forced to give away our North Sea fisheries and were subsumed into a dysfunctional Continental federation.   This has been a disaster, but now things can be put right.   And the first step must be to reclaim our 200-nautical mile EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone), as well as all our coastal waters.   The 1982 Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea adopted the concept of the EEZ.   Under this, a coastal state like Great Britain can assume jurisdiction over the exploration and exploitation of marine resources in its adjacent section of the continental shelf, taken to be a band extending 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) from its shore.   Within this area, nations can claim and exercise sovereign rights and exclusive fishery management authority over all fish and all continental shelf fishery resources (Source:  Review of Fisheries in OECD Countries:  Glossary, February 1998).   To achieve this would not only add billions of pounds of value every year to our fishing industry and do wonders for our boat building and related industries, but also give an immense psychological boost to our country.

Reclaiming our maritime resources under the 1982 United Nations Conference will take time, probably quite as much time as the 2-year Brexit process.   So as a matter of urgency our Government should begin this process as soon as possible.   At exactly the same moment, therefore, as triggering Article 50 with the European Commission, the Government should table with the United Nations a claim under the Law of the Sea for the full enforcement of Great Britain’s marine rights under international law.   Ted Heath’s Government simply betrayed the Commonwealth and betrayed our fishing industry in 1972.   Now, remembering James Cook and his Yorkshire qualities of endurance and good sense, we have the chance to put things right, while also rebuilding our old friendships above all else with Canada, Australia and New Zealand.   And if the old parties have no interest in making these things happen, then a renewed UKIP will just have to make very certain that they do!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'Medals and Mausers' 

Before anything else, huge congratulations and thank you to the whole of Team GB – astonishing!   And especially to the Yorkshire contingent, including the amazing Brownlee brothers, boxer Nicola Adams, diver Jack Laugher and cyclist Ed Clancy.   Also, let’s not forget Nick Skelton, with all his broken bones and new hip, finally taking gold at the age of 58, the British – dare I say UKIP – spirit incarnate!   And well done to Theresa May for ensuring a victory parade in the North of England, at Manchester in October, from where so many of our great athletes come.   Who were those idiots who said that Britain was finished and that we could never go it alone?   And for a quick Euro-chuckle, the German company Euro Information, which lists the European Commission and European Parliament as its principal clients, has already issued an EU version of the medal table which has amalgamated Team GB’s golds with all the medals won by other European countries to put the EU firmly on top!   Just for the record, its table put “European Union” at No. 1, followed by the United States and then China, Russia and Japan, with Great Britain nowhere to be seen.   Sorry Fritz, not for much longer now!

From all this wonderful news, let me turn again to what is really happening in the EU and what our BBC and EU-adoring press is simply not reporting.   On 2nd October next, Hungary is due to hold its own referendum on the EU’s migration policy, which could mark the end of the Schengen border-free zone.   And Karoly Kontrat, Minister of State at Hungary’s Ministry of the Interior, has just declared;

 “It is clearly demonstrable and can be stated as a fact that there is a connection between immigration and terrorism.   Other consequences of the migration crisis are health care implications as well as implications of a social, cultural and economic nature.   More than 300 people have died in Europe as a result of terrorist attacks since mass illegal migration started, and these attacks were committed by terrorists with an immigrant background....These attacks were committed against European culture, Christian Europe and the European way of life, and attacks of this nature may occur anywhere, at any time...The threat of terrorism should be reduced, which is only possible if we stop illegal migration.   The EU’s wrong migration policy doesn’t follow this idea, although we won’t protect the borders of the European Union, the threat of terrorism will continue to prevail.”   

At the same time, Sky News has just carried out an undercover investigation on the sheer scale of the arms trade across the Continent, with weapons being shipped illegally from war-torn Ukraine to customers across Europe.   With no border checks across the Schengen zone and the remote mountains of the Balkans providing perfect hideouts, Romanian criminal gangs in particular are boasting about how demand has soared in the past two years.   AK-47 assault rifles are the most regularly sought-after weapon, but new sniper rifles at £2,540.00 and Austrian military Stayr rifles with top-end sights are also in demand.   Other gangs also supply heavy weapons like rocket launchers, grenades, rocket-propelled grenades and land mines.   And ISIS is a regular customer in this roaring trade.  So well done Sky News for revealing what our mainstream media is just too frightened to report!

All this demonstrates exactly why a sensible, disciplined UKIP is now needed more than ever.   Not just to support our marvellous athletes when their successes are claimed by the propagandists at Euro Information as “European Union” triumphs, but also to protect our country from the failures of the Euro-currency zone and the terror-wracked Schengen zone.   Somehow we have to combine being completely open to the World with having completely secure borders.   This is a very difficult balancing act, but it is perfectly possible to achieve as part of a successful Brexit.   And, as our wonderful sportsmen and sportswomen have demonstrated with such courage and skill in Rio, everything is possible!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'The Path Of Least Resistance'

Last week I wrote about Edward Heath, his acolyte Douglas Hurd and the conspiracy in the House of Lords to sabotage Brexit.   Today I want to say something about the risk of a similar plot in the House of Commons and to introduce you to David Lidington who last month became Leader of the Commons.   And what is extraordinary is how the same thread runs through so much of our politics and the same suspects re-emerge in new guises.   Now David Lidington is yet another Eurofanatic politician, who in 1987 became Special Adviser to none other than Douglas Hurd himself.   In 1989 they moved to the Foreign Office together.   In 1992 he was elected MP for Aylesbury with the support of his patron, who was by now Foreign Secretary.  With the return of a Conservative-led Government in 2010, David Lidington became Minister for Europe, where he predictably trotted out the Foreign Office’s Euro-fanatical line at every opportunity, and then last month he became Leader of the House of Commons.   And where this is relevant to Thirsk & Malton is that the other day our own pro-Remain MP Kevin Hollinrake was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to David Lidington.  So the picture is unfolding.   Now Kevin Hollinrake is a charming and genuinely likeable character, whom any of us would be happy to have as a friend, but his open wish to please everyone makes him politically dangerous a time of great risk like the present.   Taking the line of least resistance is the wrong response in a world where the dangers are growing by the day.

The situation now resembles increasingly what was happening in the 1930’s, when news from the Continent was routinely censored and evidence of growing atrocities was routinely suppressed.   And in just the same way, the Foreign Office and the BBC, two of the worst offenders then, are still offering a rose-tinted view of the realities of Europe.   Yet now as in the 1930’s the Poles, who are a hugely courageous and resilient people, are ready to offer a blinker-free view of developments in Europe.  That Poland has survived at all with Russia on one side and Germany on the other, both eyeing up its huge territory with hungry looks, is a miracle in itself.    And in the same spirit that brought so many young pilots to fly with the RAF in the Battle of Britain, which could well have been lost without them, brave Poles are now speaking out.   Jacek Wrona is a former Polish Central Bureau of Investigation officer who has just declared, “The worst problem for the police service is political correctness...Europe is at the end of its existence...Western Europe is practically dead.   These people live in a void, without ideas.”   And Dr. Rafal Brzeski is a military historian who has just said likewise. “The Germans have had enough of this, which does not mean the government has had enough.   There are two different approaches...The whole Balkans are flooded with weapons, and from the Balkans have come two million people.   Together with them came arms dealers, gangsters, drug dealers.  Buying a Kalashnikov in Bosnia and Herzegovina is as it was after the war with us.   You can buy one for peanuts.”   Predictably the governments of Poland and Germany have fallen out over absorption of the migrant flow.

And even ordinary Germans are starting to speak out against the suppression of the news.   ‘Bild’ magazine has just reported a high-ranking police official in Frankfurt as saying, “There are strict instructions from the top not to report offences committed by refugees.   It is extraordinary that certain offenders are deliberately not being reported about and the information is being classified as confidential.”   And according to Andre Schulz, head of Germany’s Association of Criminal Police, 90% of sex crimes there are not being reported – this in a country where the rape crisis has spread to cities and towns in al 16 of Germany’s federal states.   It is to prevent the virus of violence and terror within the EU reaching our own shores that we need to regain control of our borders as a matter of urgency.   Brexit-lite, or even worse no Brexit at all, for which so many members of both the House of Lords and House of Commons are now working, is a growing danger to the peace of our country.   However delightful a character our own MP may be, and I’m sure his own patron David Lidington is equally delightful on a personal basis, the failure to recognise and acknowledge what is really happening within the EU represents a political risk that none of us should have to face.   So Brexit really must mean Brexit!

Until next Tuesday! 

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'Lords a Leaping'

 

For Edward Heath, Europe was a religion.   Those who questioned the project were to be cast into outer darkness.   But for those who colluded in its plots and schemes, no reward - political or financial - could be too great.   And the poison of what was in essence a false religion entered the bloodstream of our whole Establishment.   Britain was to be subsumed by stealth into a country called Europe and, if you objected, you were no longer a fit and proper person.    And if you thought that extreme Europhilia passed with Edward Heath’s death in 2005 you were mistaken, for his spirit lives on in the form of his acolyte, Douglas Hurd, now 86 and Lord Hurd of Westwell.  From 1968-70, he ran Edward Heath’s private office, from 1970-74 he was Edward Heath’s political secretary in Downing Street, in 1974 he became MP for what is now David Cameron’s constituency and Edward Heath’s PPS, from 1979-83 he was Minister for Europe, from 1989-95 he was Foreign Secretary and in 1997 he retired to the House of Lords, where for many years he sat on the House of Lords Appointments Commission.   And in 1993 as Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd signed the Maastricht Treaty under which our laws were wholly subordinated to the European Court and all Britons from the Queen down became “Citizens of Europe”, even though in her Coronation Oath our faithful and dutiful Queen had sworn to govern the British people “according to their laws and customs”.  Now where all this is relevant is that for all those years in which Douglas Hurd sat on the House of Lords Appointments Commission, any candidate for a life peerage who had expressed doubts about the EU project was ruthlessly excluded, while a motley collection of opportunistic Eurofanatics was welcomed with open arms.  And now that motley collection is seeking to overturn the settled will of the British people by rejecting the result of June’s Referendum.

 

Two of the most motley of them all are Lady (Patience) Wheatcroft and Lord (Michael) Heseltine.   Writing last week, Lady Wheatcroft threatened to derail Brexit, declaring “I hope that there would be a majority prepared to stall the bill through the one session of parliament that is possible before the Parliament Act can be invoked.   That would be a break with convention that the House of Lords does not stand in the way of a manifesto commitment.   But when it was a manifesto commitment to plunge into the unknown, I for one am prepared to go against convention”, while Lord Heseltine simply exclaimed, “We all know that the people are not sovereign.   Parliament is supreme.”   Because of the system of life peerages that developed under Tony Blair, the House of Lords, now loaded with Eurofanatics as it is, is where Brexit is most likely to be sabotaged.   And David Cameron’s 13 courtiers, nominated to the Lords only last week, will be among those busy derailing June’s Referendum result.   All this is why UKIP’s own internal difficulties now need to be resolved as a matter of urgency.   As part of an early resolution, I would like to see Nigel Farage become our Party’s President, in recognition of his extraordinary work in turning the tide of history, the excellent Diane James become our new leader and the charismatic Steven Woolfe become deputy leader with specific responsibility for campaigning in the North of England.   No doubt others will have their own ideas of how best to make up a dream team, but the elements are there in UKIP to form one and ensure that Brexit does indeed mean Brexit.

 

The other day, a leading article in the Spectator magazine rightly stated, “Brexit is neither an economic drag nor a stimulus:  it is simply the removal of a constraint.   What Britain now goes on to achieve depends entirely on the vision and ambition of those in power.   Politicians and businesses should snap out of their sulk, and see Brexit for what it is:  the greatest opportunity ever handed to a government by an electorate.”   UKIP’s task now must be to do everything possible to ensure that this opportunity is not squandered, at least not by self-serving former ministers and their chums in the House of Lords still in thrall to the false and failed religion of the EU.   And we need that dream team, I hope made up of Nigel Farage as President, Diane James as leader and Steven Woolfe as deputy leader, in place soon to take our party forward, building on the astonishing achievement of June’s Referendum!

 

Until next Tuesday!

 

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'Bordering On Disgraceful'

“I don’t see why my son should be denied a job with Goldman Sachs in London by a bunch of white trash in the North of England!”, she said looking at me with unfeigned contempt and not disguising who she had in mind.   She was the pro-Remain wife of a well-known pro-Remain High Court judge whom I recently met.   Remonstrating that the U.S. bank Goldman Sachs had threatened to relocate to Frankfurt in the event of Brexit, she explained that she had a son in Geneva who was hoping to return to London and a daughter working in New York.   All I could do was chuckle and reply that, when I last checked, Switzerland wasn’t in the EU and I didn’t think that America was either.   But it is a measure of the bile and fury of the embittered Remainers that we were having this conversation.   Now I was more than happy to be described as Northern white trash by the amiable High Court judge’s wife, but I thought that she could never have used that charming expression in connection with the splendid Priti Patel, one of the true stars of the Leave campaign.   And Priti Patel’s reward has come in being appointed Secretary of State for International Development in Theresa May’s new cabinet.

Born in 1972, when she was elected for Witham in Essex in 2010 Priti Patel was the first Hindu woman Member of Parliament.   Her parents were Gujarati Ugandan immigrants who left their country just before Idi Amin announced the expulsion of Ugandan Asians.   In the best tradition, they built up a chain of newsagents in the South-East of England and will have been thrilled to see their gifted daughter embark on a career in public life.  From 1995 to 1997 she ran the Referendum Party’s press office before moving to William Hague’s own press office.   Then from 2003 to 2007 she found herself working for Diageo, the British multinational alcoholic beverages company where she helped shape “a global strategy on responsible drinking”, something to endear her to all UKIP members.   Her political views too were entirely consistent with UKIP’s and it was not surprising when towards the end of last year she joined the Vote Leave Campaign Committee.   By then, just 5 years after becoming an MP, she was already Minister of State for Employment in the Department for Work and Pensions and a Privy Councillor.   And one campaign for which she became celebrated was for the scrapping of the Department for International Development, largely on account of the sheer volume of overseas aid that disappears in fraud and outright theft.   By appointing her to head that Department, it is hoped that the incidence of corruption can begin to diminish.

Now Britain is unique in the world in being the only country to spend 0.7% of our Gross Domestic Product on Overseas Aid, in addition to our broadly equivalent net transfers to the European Union.   This is happening at a time when the risk of terrorist activity, and particularly EU-related terrorist activity, is growing by the day.   Yet our border controls remain an unqualified disgrace.  By way of example, Italy has 4,772 miles of coastline and some 600 border patrol vessels.  Britain has 7,700 miles of coastline and just 3 border patrol vessels, up from 2 in 2009.   America’s border control force is the same size as her navy.   Small British harbours and isolated beaches in particular are being targeted by people smugglers and illegal migrants.   Small airfields go unpatrolled and the promised checks are not yet in place.   Illegal immigrants are simply arriving in vehicles belonging to people smugglers.   All this is well known, as is the way in which the UK Border Agency is being overwhelmed by the pressures it faces.  Now this is not UKIP policy but, with a sympathetic Secretary of State in place, there does seem to be a strong case to divert a large part of our International Development budget to countering the threat of terrorism both around the world and at our borders.   At the moment, there is little public support for a policy which, like the EU budget, is so susceptible to fraud.   But if it were used as a resource to fight terrorism both overseas and within the UK, not least at our borders, then that public support could return.   And the excellent Priti Patel, who fought so bravely in the Leave campaign and who indeed campaigned to abolish the Department she now heads, would have earned the thanks not just of UKIP but of our whole country.   And not even that charming pro-Remain wife of the pro-Remain High Court judge, so desperate for her son to work in Goldman Sachs, could accuse her of just being Northern white trash!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby