Hysterical liars of the week

Check out this front page, from the Daily Express (the paper that even the Daily Mail thinks is barking mad):

Is it true? No, of course it isn't.

FURY erupted last night after a European Union plot to “carve up Britain” by setting up a cross-Channel region was exposed. 

Senior Tories condemned plans to merge southern England and northern France into a territory called “Arc Manche” complete with its own flag. 

Brussels chiefs have already earmarked millions of pounds for lavish projects designed to give the zone its own “identity”.

It's simply an hysterical bit of utter rubbish which - shamefully - appears to be dictated by a Conservative Government minister in the run-up to the local government elections. Propaganda of the very worst sort - ruined only by a) being lies and b) the Express's plummeting readership. This sort of stuff is why the British press has such an awful reputation.

Tory Cabinet Minister Eric Pickles yesterday revealed details of the plan inherited by his Whitehall department from the previous Labour government.

The Communities Secretary said: “Labour ministers have been caught red-handed conspiring with European bureaucrats to wipe England off the map and replace our historic boroughs, counties and cities with transnational Euro-regions.

It's an infrastructure and tourism idea - the EU hasn't got the right to merge countries! I notice too that in the 'minds' of Pickles and the Express, 'southern England' and the UK are the same thing - as I've long suspected. As is traditional with this kind of 'journalism', we get several paragraphs of confected outrage from weirdo extremists (Douglas Carswell, Nigel Farage, the Tax-Evaders Alliance), before we reach the shocking truth about this fiendish Euro-plot: far from being:

“a bid to subvert the St George’s flag and the Union Jack”

it's actually:

a series of cycle routes seeking to link northern France and southern England… a £2million travelling exhibition of “contemporary” artworks and even a bizarre international tour by circus clowns costing £5.5million

Those evil Euro-Clowns!

However, I have news for the Express and for the Conservative Party. There WAS a serious plan to merge the UK and France (again - let's not forget that under the Normans England and the bits of Britain it controlled were outposts of Normandy, and the Plantagenets claimed to be Kings of France and Britain).

The final "DECLARATION OF UNION" approved by the British War Cabinet stated that:

France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations, but one Franco-British Union. The constitution of the Union will provide for joint organs of defence, foreign, financial and economic policies. Every citizen of France will enjoy immediately citizenship of Great Britain, every British subject will become a citizen of France.

So which traitorous nutter wanted to declare an Act of Union between Britain and France, in 1940? Why, it was that dangerous Europhile, winner of the Charlemagne Prize for his contribution to the European Ideal, advocate of a United States of Europe ("We Must Build A Kind of United States of Europe" - Zurich speech, 1946) and, er, Conservative Prime Minister and war hero, Winston Churchill!

And that's not all: another Conservative PM, Anthony Eden, considered it again, in 1956!

Let's see what Pickles and the Express have to say about that…

Question Time - how was it for you?

Frankly, I was a little bored. Griffin occasionally let his tightly-controlled facade slip with some very silly comments (indigenous 'British' = those descended from the ice age inhabitants! I'm not sure when the Celts turned up, but the Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans, Dutch etc. all fit Griffin's preferred racial characteristics and arrived a lot more recently than that) and defended his meetings with David Duke of the KKK with the words 'almost entirely non-violent'.

The other guests were pretty weak. They'd all looked up Griffin's past comments and turned every single question towards the BNP's racial policy - to which Griffin had similarly well-planned responses. If the BNP want to be a serious party, they need to have policies on everything, from water metering to agricultural run-off levels - an opportunity was lost to expose how narrow and limited the BNP is. Because they all went over the same ground repeatedly, it became a sterile debate.

I was a bit annoyed about the Churchill debate though - surely someone could have pointed out that he wouldn't have joined the BNP, Tories OR Labour, because he fully supported a United States of Europe (his words), founded the European Movement and received the Charlemagne Prize for his efforts in that direction.

The only person on the show to come out of it well was the playwright and British Museum director Bonnie Greer, somewhat predictably: she was calm, witty, authoritative and didn't hector. Churchill was half-American and got to be PM: let's get Bonnie Greer into Parliament!

I watched the programme while eating a curry, which seemed appropriate. Then this morning I went to the pool and shared the water with immigrants! To whom I then chatted! What a race traitor I am…

After that, I had the immense satisfaction of shouting 'scab' at some postmen. Griffin and his jackbooted fantasists belong in the lowest circle of hell, but scabs will be sitting close by. I should have stuck a stick through the spokes of the one on a bike. I've very few principles (obviously), but one is to never cross a picket line, and it's served me well.

Let's get UKIP

This is what the Advertising Standards Authority told me when I inquired about complaining about UKIP's disgraceful and cynical appropriation of United States of Europe enthusiast Winston Churchill for their grubby little campaign:

Dear Dr [Vole]

Thank you for your e-mail to the Advertising Standards Authority.

Advertising or marketing communications whose principal function is to influence votes in local, regional, national or international elections are exempt from the advertising Codes so we are unable to investigate complaints about these.

Kind regards

Cynical Ben, in an earlier comment, suggests that this means we can found a 'Nick Griffin is a Twat' party and save up for posters proclaiming this principle. Anyone up for starting a kitty? We could extend it to UKIP as well.

Cheating dishonest UKIP scum

You may have seen this billboard for UKIP (BNP for the Mail-reading accountancy classes), the United Kingdom Independence Party, recruiting Winston Churchill to their anti-European cause. (As an aside, how do they manage to oppose the European Union while defending the United Kingdom Union?). The accompanying election poster declares, amidst a load of largely inaccurate bullshit, that Winston wouldn't let it happen. 

Er… let's see what Churchill (largely a bad man with the necessary skills needed to save Britain in its darkest hour) had to say about a United Europe shall we?

"I wish to speak to you today about the tragedy of Europe. (...) Yet all the while there is a remedy which, if it were generally and spontaneously adopted by the great majority of people in many lands, would as if by a miracle transform the whole scene, and would in a few years make all Europe, or the greater part of it, as free and as happy as Switzerland is today. What is this sovereign remedy? It is to recreate the European Family, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe. (...) The first step in the recreation of the European Family must be a partnership between France and Germany."

Winston ChurchillSpeech at Zurich University 19th September 1946

(http://www.historiasiglo20.org/europe/anteceden2.htm)

Now UKIP might claim that Winston wanted an EU to keep France and Germany peaceful without Britain necessarily being a member, but there's no denying that he was a fan, and the Franco-German union is merely 'the first step'. Even better than this, fact fans, is his plan presented to Parliament in 1940 for a united British-French nation. Eat that, a-historical little Englander bigots. 

(I'm an itchy, intolerant leftwinger. Traditionally the left sees the EU as a capitalist plot, whereas the right sees it as a socialist plot). In many ways, they're both right - but I'd rather have a reformed united Europe than the centre-right government we have now).