The Labour government of Harold Wilson sent every voter a pamphlet advising us to vote to stay in the EEC. A crucial promise was made
”There was a threat to employment in Britain from the movement in the Common Market towards an Economic and Monetary Union. This could have forced us to accept fixed exchange rates for the pound, restricting industrial growth and so putting jobs at risk . This threat has been removed”
Well it was not. As they rightly forecast EMU would destroy jobs which is what happened when the UK was pushed into it by all 3 main parties.
The tract also assured us we would not lose our Parliamentary sovereignty. It said
”It is the Council of Ministers who take the important decisions…The Minister representing Britain can veto any new law or tax if he considers it to be against British interests”
Instead the EEC/EU went over to qualified majority votes where we could be ignored or overridden.
March 23, 2025
Politicians lie, what’s new. The tories lied over Brexit and ee have Sunaks preposterous Windsor Agreement ceding sovereignty of Northern Ireland to Brussels.
Now we have 2TK stealthily easing us back into the EU.
We really are overdue a revolution to rid us of the state terrorists in Westminster.
Off topic, yesterday I visited my cousin in Lincolnshire, there is no gas available so he had gone full electric ashp solar panels and battery storage. All the radiators have been resized and I was surprised to find when the hot water for bathing etc was being heated the central heating goes off.
When the heating came back on the radiators are barely warm to the touch. He’s quite happy with it, less so his wife who is continually cold. Their only back up is a 2kw electric fire in the lounge
There’s no wonder people don’t want them
March 23, 2025
As I understand it (from Harry’s Farm YT) you need a good chunk of land to make effective use of heat pumps. His solar panels around the side of his house however have been a bit of a disappointment – Not surprisingly.
March 23, 2025
Solar panel to power heat pumps is not very clever at all you get the electricity largely in the summer months around lunchtime and need the electricity on the short cold winter days and nights and it cannot be stored other than a huge cost. Solar panel to drive a heat pump to heat your swimming pool in summer make rather more sense though. But prob. still rather more expensive than just using gas or oil when capital costs considered.
March 23, 2025
Indeed and as electricity cost far more than gas so it will cost more to run too even if it does give a two to three times COP. Furthermore as it is slow to heat up you end up having to leave it on when out or away which wastes more fuel. Also the colder it is outside the lower the CoP you get and this is exactly when you need most heat! This further means huge grid capacity improvements of say x10 needed just for a few cold winter weeks! Bonkers
Get a wood burner! Or thermals and ski gear to wear indoors.
March 23, 2025
Douglas Carswell in the Telegraph. These are the nine ‘milestones’ (under which are grouped the 34 specific policy steps):
1. Securing Control Over Public Administration
2. Securing Control Over Borders
3. Undoing the Blairite Legislative Legacy
4. Unleash Growth
5. Reduce Public Spending
6. Tax Cuts
7. Public Sector Reform
8. Strengthening Defence, Realign Foreign Policy
9. Remigration & Integration
But he misses of the vital few:- Scrap Net Zero, cheap relaible on demand energy, stop government market rigging of energy, housing, schools, transport, water, EVs, heat pumps… in short get the Government out of the damn way!
March 23, 2025
@Lifelogic – the exact list that the Blob and this Government will fight the people into obscurity over. The ‘Me’ Generation have stolen democracy and power.
Douglas Carswell in the Telegraph, a lengthy and insightful item
March 23, 2025
Democracy is now it seems called “populism” and to Starmer is doubtless evil and “far right”!
March 23, 2025
I’m afraid Carswell formulated the idea that the whole constituency (always an anti-Conservative combined majority) could SELECT the Conservative candidate. We therefore had Liberals and Socialists posing as Conservatives at elections, and being elected by Conservative Constituencies.
It’s HIS FAULT that the Tory party is rank and will never recover.
He has absolutely NO JUDGEMENT or integrity.
March 23, 2025
‘ Get a wood burner! Or thermals and ski gear to wear indoors.’
Skiing used to be my main holiday. I did all the main resorts in Europe and North American. Gradually trading down from places like Davos, Wengen etc to Italy. After lockdown, I haven’t bothered to travel -certificates required, hassle at airports and cost at least doubling what is was pre-lockdown.
However, ski socks and thermals I now use at home. So they have not gone to waste. A forty year old ski jacket with removal sleeves I use for gardening.
Those inexpensive wearable blankets are also useful. You soon recoup the cost.
March 23, 2025
That or have only one warm room for the colder months with a wood burner perhaps. The wood you collect and chop yourself warms you twice as they say.
March 23, 2025
The politicians lie, and the people still vote for them.
Sweet lies win over blunt truth every time when it comes to the ballot box.
March 23, 2025
Well they nearly all lie, so they have v. little choice but to vote for liars in most areas. Which liar is the least bad liar!
March 23, 2025
That’s the way it seems to me. It’s not so much who’s telling the truth as whose lies do you disbelieve the least.
March 23, 2025
Short memories, forgiving sins and being largely apathetic.
Do they deserve a vote? Perhaps a new eligibility test? You must take part in at least 50% of available elections in the contituency or you miss eligibility for this one?
Spoilt paper would count as a vote.
March 23, 2025
oh, and no postal voting.
March 23, 2025
@Ian Wraggg
EU Laws in place because the people we empowered and paid refused to be our Legislators. EU Courts still in charge of UK Courts and get to dictate outcomes, is that because our Judges cant be trusted to be independent and don’t have other agendas.
It is the whole of the structure that needs removing they all give the appearance that they see the unelected unaccountable as their rulers. There is no one standing up for the UK or its People, they come across as ‘free-loaders’ seeking out their next lofty well paid position in the EU.
March 23, 2025
It was a takeover by stealth to which the majority of UK politicians were blind. I can only put it down to a collective political loss of faith in GB Plc to make its way profitably in the World. Nor did those same politicians know how to write the game rules of independent commercial success. In fairness to them their life experience was WW2, the Suez Canal, the Korean War, the Malayan Insurrection, and a rapidly shrinking British Empire. I suspect they were so war weary that the emerging EU was a political life raft, as they saw it, so they followed what they erroniously saw as the easy way out.
All credit to our late Queen Elizabeth who saw great virtue in retaining much of the now independent empire as a Commonwealth of nations. Our blinkered politicians had, and to this day, demonstrate that they have little idea of what to do with it. A further demonstration of their paucity of commercial and political vision. A majority of current politicians continue to look upon the EU with a lazy nostalgia and little acceptance of its shortcomings, a dirth of democracy being a pivotal one. The Commonwealth could have been the Worlds largest Free Trade Area offering Trade not Aid. Analyse the name for a political pathway.
March 23, 2025
@Agricola – President Trump is said to be musing on America’s becoming an “associate” Commonwealth member.
What a great idea! It would start to retrieve our worst ever policy blunder, when King George III threw away the American colonies and with them the stupendous prospect of a United States of the Atlantic.
A Commonwealth free trade area (there used to be one, Imperial Preference) with the US inside would be a trade powerhouse indeed.
March 23, 2025
Nick, caveat emptor, and incidentally the Commonwealth is an Association of like minded states already. Every nation large and small belongs because they choose to. In extremis nations can be exciled for behaviour that is way beyond the acceptable.
My desire would be to turn it into a free trade area, without growing it with rules beyond the existing association. God forbid, not another EU with all its political baggage.
The question alongside the USA joining, is would the USA be willing to trade freely in both directions without a desire to exert any form of political control.
When any two nations enter into free trade the choice of each others goods should be absolutely a free choice. Little nation A should be totally free to say we like free range chicken from nation B, but not the battery chlorinated chicken nation B would like to sell us. That is a free market of choice. The very antithisis of what the EU Common Market is.
The big question for President Donald Trump, who seems enamourd of our royal family, is could he accept association minus any form of control. The other question is would the Commonwealth be minded to become a Free Trade Area.
March 23, 2025
If they are ‘like minded’ why do the majority vote against the U.K. at every opportunity in the UN?
March 23, 2025
What exactly is the Commonwealth for apart from making our wealth ‘common to them’ and giving the Royal Family a façade’.
The late Queeen saw the benefit of herself becoming a common citizen of a foreign power. She agreed to denude us all of our birthright – the citizenship of our own nation.
March 23, 2025
My old uni friend Jonathan is disabled. He was knocked off his motorbike ten years ago by a hit and run driver and was then run over by car. Johnathan lives in an NHS wheelchair, in a ground floor housing association flat with a postage-stamp sized back garden. He is very worried about the prospect of losing his PIP payments, which he uses to get a home help in twice a day to cook and keep the flat tidy
Jonathan works from home as a call handler for an insurance company. The maximum hours he is allowed to work by the benefits system are 17 hours a week. If he works an extra hour, he loses 50% of his benefit for that hour. That’s effectively a 50% income tax rate.
I never thought I would see a Labour government making the disabled pay for the interest on the national debt, due to the profligate printing of money during the last Parliament. Reeves and Starmer should hang their heads in shame.
March 23, 2025
SG
Labour need to cut costs wherever possible. How are they going to fund the thousands of channel paddlers and train drivers.
Your disabled friend is ripe for exploitation by this Marxist shower.
March 23, 2025
SG
Thank you for sharing this and I hope your friend does not lose his PIP. I do not mind paying taxes so long as it is well spent and if it is going to go to others then those like your friend should get some help.
It was not just this Labour government, but all governments over the last 30 odd years. But what is especially galling is those who are UK Citizens are being treated far worse than those who have arrived here illegally.
We have a political class that rewards wrong-doers and punishes those, one way or another, for doing the right thing.
There is much wrong in the ‘House of Albion’ and it needs fixing. Those currently in Westminster are not the answer and, it is such a shame that a friend of yours may have to suffer for you to see what we all see.
First it was the OAP’s (Winter fuel allowance). But I am not an OAP so, why should I care ? Then it was the farmers. But I am not a farmer, so why should I care ? Then it was employers (ENIC Taxes). But I am not an employer, so why should I care ? Now it’s those on PIP. But I am not on PIP, so why should I care ? Soon it they will come for your home. And we will all own nothing and (they) will be happy.
March 23, 2025
Maybe Jonathan is paying for the net zero government mission that all mainstream parties had accepted by 2008 more than he is paying for the profligacy of the previous Labour government. George Osborne carried on with the quantitative easing scheme to rig the gilts market because the economy was as sluggish then as it is now and he needed to borrow more, effectively from the Bank of England. For six decades before 2008 the trend growth rate of the UK economy was 2.7% a year. since 2008 it has been only 1.1% a year – why?
Well, if achieving net zero emissions by 2050 really will cost around a trillion pounds over the next 25 years:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/02/20/net-zero-far-more-expensive-than-public-thinks-lord/
then that could mean around £40 billion a year now, which would be roughly equivalent to 1.6% of GDP.
OK, so it is just coincidence that the previous trend growth rate was exactly 1.6% higher than the present trend growth rate, because nobody including the OBR knows how much our noble efforts to prevent the planet overheating will cost us over what period, and how that cost will translate to changes in economic growth, but the numbers are in the right ballpark to explain why Rachel Reeves, and all future Chancellors, will struggle.
March 23, 2025
I should think it’s a marginal tax rate of well over 100% for the first few hours over 17. And he probably doesn’t break even on a net basis until he is close to full time equivalent.
March 23, 2025
Do not conflate PIP with benefits.
The benefits are hoovered up by all not just disabled and are too generous.
PIP should be allocated monthly except for chronic conditions which will not change.
March 23, 2025
They are certainly in a doom loop and making it worse by the day. The more they raise taxes the more they throttle the golden goose that lays the eggs. They keep going on about real wages rising – but this is just them passing minimum wage increase laws which (on top of the NI rises) will just destroy many jobs and further increase benefits. So no real increase at all. Also leave businesses with less to invest and little reason to do so.
March 23, 2025
No compensation for this injury? Somehow this type of thing should be insurance covered rather than covered by taxpayers.
March 23, 2025
SG. I do feel great sympathy for your friend having been injured and permanently disabled. It’s marvellous he has found work. But when you say “the maximum he is allowed to work under the benefits system” what you mean is that the system can deter people from working beyond 17hrs, via loss of benefits. It’s not an absolute work ban.
It begs the question as to whether your friend could work full time and survive without benefits. If this were the case, I would feel less sympathy with his financial predicament.
Assuming he can’t survive on/manage to do, full time work then I have every sympathy for his position and wish the benefits regime were more tailored to individuals’ circumstances.
March 23, 2025
Good morning.
Remainers today often sight (still) the fact that the 2016 Referendum to LEAVE the EU was a narrow one. But they, as well as Leavers, fail to mention that, BEFORE the 1975 Referendum the UK Parliament voted to join the then EEC and, that vote was, if I recall, only achieved by a single vote. Hardly a mandate, hence why a Referendum was called. It was also called because of internal party strains and, because the full effects of the so called ‘Common Market’ as it was misleadingly portrayed was yet to be fully realised.
Come 2016 and the berth of the EU and the debacle of Sterling’s membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and the damage it caused both the nation the reputation of the Conservative Party, it was inevitable that feeling over the EU and the fact that we were lied to were going to be a factor in our membership.
Enoch Powell predicted that, once we became fully aware what the EU was and what it really meant for this nation, we would reject it. As so it proved to be.
But the response from the REMAINER faction has, in my opinion, been nothing less than traitorous. How luck they must feel that the Good King Tony Blair sought fit to remove the death penalty for high treason. His and his and his party’s first act when coming into power in 1997.
The Establishment Remainer Class, for selfish and malicious reason, has embarked on a suicide policy of MASS IMMIGRATION to destroy our sense of nationhood. We are also under attack from various media, NGO’s, so called charities and QUANGO’s to undermine our culture and heritage. A nation without history, or one fooled to be ashamed of, is one easily beaten. But what troubles me most is what they are replacing us with ?
For whilst they may achieve their aims by sowing such seeds to the win, what they will inherit will be whirlwind that will consume them as well.
March 23, 2025
Indeed but at least he gave a referendum unlike the appalling Ted Heath and he kept us out of Vietnam. The yes no question was hugely biased too.
“The Government has announced the results of the renegotiation of the United Kingdom’s terms of membership of the European Community. Do you think that the United Kingdom should stay in the European Community (the Common Market)?”
But the blame for the ERM fiasco lies with Thatcher for appointing the no math O level fool John Major as Chancellor and not listening to JR and her Economic advisor on the ERM. When all three parties are in favour of something it is invariably wrong.
The Millennium Dome, The ERM, joining the EU, the covid lockdowns 5 years back, the Covid “Vaccines”, Covid Masks, Climate Alarmism, Open door low skilled immigration, Blair’s moronic counterproductive wars, botched devolution, the Windsor Accord, ever more government & Mayors, more taxes, more red tape, subsidies for EVs, renewables, heat pumps…
March 23, 2025
In short what suits government and the state sector is usually the reverse of what is good for the electorate. More government, more taxes, higher state sector wages/pension and more red tape!
So Heathrow will learn the lessons! Was it not rather obvious to even a half competent engineer v. many years back that at the very least each runway and each terminal needed its own supply and own back up and UPS supplies for the IT. Also than having the back up close to the main supply was not a sensible back up system?
Each modern aircraft has better power back up systems.
March 23, 2025
One side of our economy creates wealth whist, the other consumes. Nothing wrong in that so long as the latter does not grown larger than the former – Oh wait ! It is !!
March 23, 2025
Futhermore, it seems ridiculous that a strategic facility should lie outside of the security zone and allegedly has neither supervision nor cctv.
March 23, 2025
The Conservative PM Heath lies were worse, claiming when he took us into the EEC with no mandate and relying on Labour votes, that there would be no loss of Sovereignty.
The Senior Mandarin overseeing the treachery advised Heath to lie “because if the people knew the truth about what was planned they would not accept it and, by the time they realised what was happening, it would be too late to leave.”
During the last 60 years it has been one lie after another, from all branches of the Westminster Uni-Party and the Foreign Office Mandarins. Even now, they LIE because we haven’t LEFT the EU …. they have stitched us up with a semi-detached status so that they can, in due course, make us an Associate Member.
In order to LEAVE the EU we need a Government which is not formed by one or another branch of the Uni-Party and which has a Leader who really does want the UK to leave. Now where will we find one of those …..?
March 23, 2025
There was no loss of Sovereignty. On any day Parliament could have voted to leave the EU, repeal all its laws incorporated into U.K. law and proceeded to govern us.
Each day they chose not to do that.
March 23, 2025
Was it not John Major expansion of Europe & Masterich that really started the rot to where we are today?
March 23, 2025
Well Heath started the rot and it just kept getting worse and worse even Thatcher did huge damage as did the Botched half leave deal and the dire Windsor Accord from the appalling (the Covid vaccines were safe B/S) Sunak. 5 years since the first, disastrous & hugely counter-productive Boris lockdown.
March 23, 2025
Forty years we were trapped in the ‘common market’ ‘EEC’ ‘EU’ Eventually we were allowed a voice on whether we should stay.
Since that vote, the ‘establishment’ has been quietly working to take us back into the EU. With Two-tier Kier in control, a man with a distant relationship with the truth, that’s where we are heading. Our only hope is this vile government collapses before much longer. It’s a long shot, sadly.
March 23, 2025
50+ is it not?
March 23, 2025
Fortunately we have ontological security theory working in our favour.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/why-we-dont-talk-about-brexit/
“Five years on, politicians are unwilling to talk about Brexit and its effects. The same goes for voters. Despite polls showing that many have now regretted voting to leave the EU, there is little appetite to reopen the question of Brexit. Albert Cullell Cano uses ontological security theory to explain why this is.”
Did you know that “Exports have plummeted since Brexit, and GDP growth has shrunk by 4–5 per cent”?
Reply Same old lie from a wrong forecast
March 23, 2025
After the 2nd referendum we had 8 years of Conservative govt, including 4 1/2 with a ‘clean’ Brexit deal also with strongly Brexit supporting PMs and cabinets and a large Brexit supporting majority in the HoC. A pity then that so little was done to take advantage of the theoretical Brexit freedoms so eloquently set out here and elsewhere. Too late now of course!
Perhaps the public just don’t support Singapore on Thames, and whilst they will vote not to be ruled by the likes of M. Juncker, they do want big govt nanny statism and protectionism? That’s certainly the conclusion from the widespread public support for the insane lockdown policy.
If that’s really the case and the UK electorate will never vote for Singapore on Thames we’d probably be better off with single market membership.
March 23, 2025
The EU Commission estimated that if we had left the EU without any special trade deal, so-called “WTO terms”, it would have cost us 3.0% of GDP, but with the Trade and Cooperation Agreement that was reduced to 2.25%. So Boris Johnson’s “zero tariff zero quota” was worth a paltry 0.75% of GDP, while rejoining the EU Single Market would have been worth 2.25%. However that number is very similar to that reported by Michel Barnier in 2012 as the GDP gain from the creation of the Single Market taken across all of the EU member states, and other studies looking at the distribution of the economic benefit put the UK’s gain as about half the average. Even at the new low trend growth rate of 1.1% a year that would be equivalent to natural growth of our economy over a year.
Reply The EU forecast losses were wrong as tge actual figures show.
March 23, 2025
The clear answer to this was for a referendum as soon as one of these promises was broken. There again Cameron said he’d leave the day after the referendum and we voted for that. So all these promises were broken by Conservatives not Labour, just for the record.
March 23, 2025
I remember in the original Heath vote, a great many people supported membership because the Labour party opposed it, and it was seen as a good way of keeping Labour out. Enoch Powell was considered something of a traitor to the cause because he saw through it all and was always against joining the Common Market.
Reply Yes. I got invited to speak at two meetings because they just assumed asI was aConservative and a City analyst I would be in favour of staying in, They got a shock when they heard me make the case to exit.
March 23, 2025
Not quite O/T: Mastroianni, A, and D.Gilbert, ‘The illusion of moral decline’, 2023, Nature 618, 782-789 (available on nature.com).
March 23, 2025
“There was a threat to employment in Britain from the movement in the Common Market towards an Economic and Monetary Union.”
The lies from politicians that EU membership was necessary “to save jobs” are nothing compared to those from our current politicians who tell us we need to unilaterally net zero our CO2 emissions “to save the planet from extinction”.
The CCC in their 7th Carbon Budget on P10 claim that Net Zero will cost just £5bn/year (0.2% of UK GDP (£2.5 tn)) when NESO has calculated the cost to net zero just our electricity by 2030 at “over £40bn annually”.
To quote H.L.Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
March 23, 2025
PS: Much is made of Net Zero providing “green jobs”. Even forgetting that the majority of “green jobs” will be in China making our wind turbines, solar panels, evs, heat pumps and the steel and copper for pylons and cables etc. the more UK people are employed in simply providing energy the poorer we all become. What good is it to our national prosperity if half the workforce is employed maintaining wind turbines, solar panels, evs and heat pumps etc.? Remember that wind turbines for instance have a relatively short lifetime of 15-20 useful years, less than a third of that for a large nuclear power plant.
March 23, 2025
Looking at the official GDP statistics back to 1948 it seems to me that something happened around the year 2008 which had the effect of drastically reducing our economic growth potential. The evidence is that before 2008 we had a trend growth rate of 2.7% a year but since 2008 it has only been 1.1% a year.
So something has changed, and while some economists who have noticed this point to the global financial crisis it is difficult to see why it should still be a significant drag on our economy 16 years later. The pandemic had a greater short term effect than the financial crisis but with a rapid recovery:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/timeseries/abmi/ukea
On the hand, if the crusade against global warming launched by the UK government and Parliament in 2008 is really costing £40 billion a year, year after year, just as a number that would be equivalent to 1.6% of GDP, which just happens to be the average of the lost economic growth each year since 2008.
March 23, 2025
Good recent report by economist Kallum Pickering at (I think) peel hunt which suggests it is indeed net zero adopted forcefully more or less around that time which is indeed responsible
March 23, 2025
Thanks.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/06/net-zero-strangling-economy-proof/
“Net zero is strangling our economy – here’s the proof”
“Limiting available electricity has stifled productivity without denting rising global emissions”
March 23, 2025
Somewhere in that period I recall that Wilson called the major parties together to get agreement that the EU was our future – they ignored much of the detail, but the decision was made at that time to pursue further integration.
No doubt there had been earlier times when our government deceived us, but that was the crucial point as far as the EU was concerned. The major parties locked us into the EU without any concern for the truth of the matter or what people wanted. Propaganda was adjusted accordingly.
Since that time except for a period of Thatcherism the big parties have been working together to define our new way of life, with socialism allowed to creep into daily life like never before. That’s what happens when a pact is signed with the devil of all parties.
That’s probably why it was so easy for the parties to work closely together on net0 and implementing the goals of the NWO. Democracy became a pale image of what it should be, while our future was assigned to the rubbish bins of history to come.
March 23, 2025
The online safety act has received very little attention, but it is pernicious and deserves to be ripped apart.
This is another version of Labour’s justice system where the degree of punishment depends on who they are.
On 29 July 2024, Bernie misidentified Southport child murderer Axel Rudakubana as Ali-Al-Shakati on X hours after the heinous attack. About a week later, Cheshire Police arrested her for “stirring up racial hatred” and “false communications.”
March 23, 2025
@Bryan Harris – this bill is the opposite to online safety, it loosens safety and security’s to ensure what is termed the State/Authorities have complete access to private information without just reason or cause. So-called ‘Fishing Trips’. In creating this free access they expose the whole country to malicious agents in foreign and hostile States.
There should be no resistance to the State making a request through the Courts when justification can be shown, the main US players comply with this scenario in the UK already. So why does the State want to monitor everyone all the time?
March 24, 2025
1984 came a little later than expected
March 23, 2025
The big new ‘misled’ ……is net-zero
March 23, 2025
So many MP types want to be seen as funny, jokey boys.
My local paper – Local MP joked strangle flytippers.
Ho Ho Ho
Meanwhile Sat eve on R4
Mentioning contingency planning
( or lack of )
for disruption of food supply.
Bimblebum waffled as usual but another guy on there sounded
reasonably intelligent.
This is a MAJOR SECURITY issue.
March 23, 2025
We joined EMU because Parliament decided we would. We gave up a few vetos because Parliament decided we would. Seems to me you only like Parliamentary sovereignty when it delivers the decisions you like. That is not how the British constitution works
March 23, 2025
Just a few …
http://en.euabc.com/upload/Final_Tables_by_Klaus_Heeger_pdf.pdf
“NUMBER OF QUALIFIED MAJORITY VOTING (QMV) ARTICLES INTRODUCED OR EXTENDED,
OR OF UNANIMITY ARTICLES MOVED TO QMV, B Y THE DIFFERENT EUROPEAN TREATIES”
Treaty of Rome (plus extensions) 38
Single European Act 12
Maastricht (Treaty on European Union) 30
Treaty of Amsterdam 24
Treaty of Nice 46
EU Constitution 68
Treaty of Lisbon 68
Of course the last two entries are equivalent, the EU Constitution having never come into force because it was rejected by the French and the Dutch, but its legal contents having been decanted into the Lisbon Treaty.
March 23, 2025
Parliament is all powerful apart from the power to denude itself of power.
March 23, 2025
Sir John
There seems to be subterfuge throughout the UK’s structures continuous attempts to bend and manipulate. Some would just call that Politics; it stops being politics in a democracy when it is the few looking to control the many for what is undoubtedly personal benefit and personal self-esteem.
I can’t see the bulk of the UK electorate signing up to be controlled by a Marxist/Socialist State that is built around ‘them & us’. Every so-called Socialist that rises in the media is in reality a champagne socialist, their riches first, their orders & control first and democracy can be ‘dammed’. It is about the entitlement of ‘Me’. But, that is what we have, the controllers and the minions that pay. No one is serving or even wanting to work with the people that empower and pay their wages – just fight against
March 23, 2025
Douglas Carswell, a rejected middle of the ground Conservative seemingly because he was against being dragged down by the Socialist Centralist that have dragged that former party on to the rocks. Yesterday took to writing a weighty piece for the Daily Telegraph. Showing a great understanding of the flaws that have infiltrated UK structure, which I would suggest have their roots in the command & control mechanisms of the undemocratic unaccountable EU. This wasn’t a complaining piece it was a question and answer item form a Centre Ground Conservative.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/22/my-plan-to-get-britain-back-on-track-growth-services-border/
Some will disagree with his answers but we cant disagree with the sentiment and the flaws pointed out. In essence while ‘Democracy’ might not be the perfect method of Government, it is the safest method. Our current evolved dictatorship that shuns the electorate is showing its-self to be a corrupt disabling system that is there for the ego of the few.
March 23, 2025
I wish the Liberal Democrat’s had taken up his idea of allowing the whole constituency to select the (Lib Dem) candidate.
Boy would I have chosen a lulu.
March 23, 2025
“There was a threat to employment in Britain from the movement in the Common Market towards an Economic and Monetary Union.”
Communists always marry a truth with a lie, generally a much bigger lie.
In this case it was the truth that EMU was being planned and the lie was that it was a threat to UK jobs.
Today the truth that the average (whatever that means) global temperature is rising (0.14 degrees C per decade according to UAH satellite data) is married with the much bigger lie that it is all caused by the burning of hydrocarbon fuels (see CCC 7th Carbon Budget P10) and will if net zero CO2 emissions is not reached by 2050 or even earlier cause the extinction of the planet.
March 25, 2025
You don’t do your homework properly OR.
Get to your beloved nsstc.uah.edu (the UAH satellite data) and ‘Visit the archives’ and look at the individual monthly maps for 2023 and 2024 that give the increased temperature relative to the 1991-2020.
Or even easier look at the map in Dec 2024 called Map Trend Yearly. It clearly shows that over the 1979-2024 period there is a large fraction of the globe where the average decadal increase has been 0.25 or even 0.35C.
So how is that comparing with your Shula & Ott’s no impact at the surface or your Wijngaarden & Happer’s forecasts? Your repeated 0.14C/decade is simply not borne by actual observations.
March 23, 2025
‘Instead the EEC/EU went over to qualified majority votes where we could be ignored or overridden.’
Why did U.K. Ministers not veto that change?
March 23, 2025
241 criminals arrived in the UK yesterday; from the safe country of France …still not in the news
March 23, 2025
From the Media
“The Chancellor and Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, will tell all government departments they must cut administrative costs by 15 per cent over the next five years.”
A good sound bite, but we need the proof it has happened. What’s the betting they leave those at the top(the problem they ordered the growth) and DEI in place, while sliding those that do the work elsewhere
March 23, 2025
Tucked away in today’s Telegraph
“The US, which is the UK’s largest individual trading partner, buys 22pc of the UK’s exports.”
The item was the usual DT clickbait about RR moving production because of Trump. Before Trump RR committed to spending $2 billion dollars updating facilities in Indianapolis. I would ‘guess’ that has something to do with the RR facilities there producing more RR products than anywhere else in the World – current US department of defence contracts alone gives them a 50 year order book. That would appear the usual UK Trump hating media trying to stir things up…
RR are elsewhere in the US, I just get to Indianapolis occasionally and enjoy it
March 23, 2025
@Ian B
“The US, which is the UK’s largest individual trading partner, buys 22pc of the UK’s exports.”
That’s with no trade agreement, without the USA interfering and dictating UK Laws and Regulations. Without the USA Courts having supremacy over UK Courts.
Just think how well the UK would fare if we were allowed to get on with other people on this Planet – without diktats coming from unelected unaccountable Bureaucrats blocking us.
March 23, 2025
Off Topic.
Reeves told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme the government wanted to use savings to invest in its priorities, such as the NHS. She said the size of the Civil Service had increased “massively” during Covid and had not returned to pre-pandemic levels.
“We are, by the end of this Parliament, making a commitment that we will cut the costs of running government by 15%,” she said.
Reeves said cutting running costs by this amount was “more than possible” given advances in technology and artificial intelligence. Pressed over how many civil service jobs could go, the chancellor told Sky News staff numbers could be reduced by about 10,000.
As of December 2024, an estimated 547,735 people were employed by the Civil Service according to the Office for National Statistics. This includes temporary and casual employees.
Is this her ‘Diane Abbott moment? 10k as percentage of 547k is nearer 2% (for those who are Math handicapped like Diane.)
March 23, 2025
MT :
I expect the Civil Service will start the process by setting up a new department to oversee the reduction and staffed with 20,000 newly recruited personnel…..
March 23, 2025
and it will take place over the next 4 years?
March 23, 2025
Now there’s a surprise, a socialist government that lied to us. That was 50 years ago and we find, regardless of their Party, all Governments over the past 30 years have lied to us BUT no one has ever taken responsibility for it.
Is it any wonder the British public seeks a new political Party?
March 24, 2025
Yes the threat of EMU had not been removed so that was a lie.
But it was not a lie or misleading to state the UK had a veto on some EU decisions. In effect it did at the time and member states still do, if one defines a veto as not voting in favour of something that passes only with a unanimous vote.
However it is true that the scope of EU areas requiring unanimity is continually reducing. In particular the current move led by Germany is to substitute QMV for unanimity in defence, security and foreign affairs. Since Germany has the largest population such a change would dramatically increase Germany’s power in the EU, really making it a German empire.
March 24, 2025
I’m wrong, the statement was that UK would have a veto on any new tax or law. Since it had a veto only on some it was a lie.