Newsletter July/August 2010

FROM THE SECRETARY:

We are planning to hold a bottle tombola on our stall at Enfield Town Show on 4th/5th September and are asking our members to each donate a bottle. It does not have to be wine; pickles, sauces, hand cream or bubble bath are very welcome. We also need clean secondhand books, preferably paperbacks. All donations to me before Wednesday, 1st September please or let me know if you want items collected.

Don’t forget our AGM on Monday, 6th September at the Angel Community Centre as usual.

Evelyn Rolph - Branch Secretary

Change in voting system
UKIP MEP Gerard Batten has always been in favour of Proportional Representation (PR) which is how the EU Parliament elections are decided. It is probably the only way in which UKIP will get MPs in Parliament. The Lib.Dems have been pressing for voting reform for many years but the system they favour, Alternative Vote (AV), will not help UKIP. Under AV electors are allowed to rank their candidates in order of preference. Initially only the first preferences are counted and if any candidate has secured more than 50% of the vote, then he or she is elected MP for that constituency. If not, the one with the fewest votes is eliminated (possibly the UKIP candidate?) and second choices on that candidate’s paper added to the tallies of the others. This process is repeated until one candidate gets 50% of the vote. [This is not the kind of PR I want! - Ed].

“Swift” data sharing
The EU have plans to create a vast database of individuals’ financial information which they will share with the USA, supposedly for security reasons. Our UKIP MEPs voted against it in the EU Parliament.

More sales of “family silver”
Tate & Lyle is selling its British sugar division to American Sugar Refining, including its Golden Syrup brand, because the new EU price regime has made the refining of cane sugar uneconomic.

Three British engineering companies have been sold to overseas companies this year: Chloride to Emerson Electric, Delta to Valmont Industries and Scott Wilson to URS, all of them American companies. A total of 407 British firms were taken over by foreign companies in the first six months of 2010.

BP is planning to sell £19bn of assets to fund its Gulf of Mexico oil spill liabilities. The Russians are interested.

George Thomson, general secretary of the National Federation of Sub-Postmasters has warned that Royal Mail should not be sold to a foreign company.

Alan Bown donation 2004
I am delighted to hear that the Supreme Court has voted in favour of UKIP in the case against the Electoral Commission which had decided that UKIP should forfeit the donation of £348,216 by Alan Bown.

European Investigation Order (EIO)
David Cameron promised in his election manifesto that no further powers would be handed to the EU without the British people having a say in a referendum but he has agreed to hand sweeping Big Brother powers to the EU. The European Investigation Order gives the police of other EU states the right to travel to the UK to arrest Britons suspected of an offence (no matter how minor or whether it is even criminal in the UK), to place them under surveillance, bug telephone conversations, monitor bank accounts and demand fingerprints, DNA or blood samples. The UK’s huge DNA database means UK citizens will be subject to much greater exposure to data requests than other EU citizens. The final draft of the Order will be decided by Qualified Majority Voting under the Lisbon Treaty. The UK could have opted out from EIO - Denmark has.

Social networking sites
The EU wants its communications department to set up a panel of experts to supervise social networking sites with internet monitoring software that will send them alerts when unfavourable comment is posted on blogs.

Luxemburg
Fred went on a 5-day UKIP organised trip to Luxemburg recently and visited the original EU Parliament building, now used solely as offices. The building is very ugly, how you imagine the KGB HQ would look. It was here that Margaret Thatcher demanded, and got, the UK rebate.

Day-to-day news from July

1st - The French have passed a Bill which could see people jailed for being rude to their partners. UKIP MEP Mike Nattrass (with tongue in cheek) has suggested that if you are on holiday in France and your wife asks: “Does my bum look big in this?” never reply ‘yes’ or you could face court. He has even suggested that on your return home from holiday you might find yourself the subject of a European Arrest Warrant!

1st - The EU Court of Justice has ruled that De Beers, the biggest producer of diamonds, must stop buying uncut gems from Russia in order to limit De Beer’s hold on the global market.

5th - A quarter of homeless people on the streets of London are eastern Europeans. In the last three years as many as 1,000 vagrants have been sent home, on flights funded by the British taxpayer.

7th - The Bank of England has made a notional £10bn profit because the weakness of the pound has made British bonds more attractive and foreign investors have been withdrawing their money from the eurozone.

8th - The EU has fined Britain more than £150 million for failing to display the EU flag on a string of projects part-funded by the EU. The Taxpayers’ Alliance notes that the Foreign & Commonwealth Office has spent £14,003 on the purchase of 249 EU flags over the 5 years 2004-09.

8th - The UK will run out of landfill sites in less than 8 years time. Unless the amount of rubbish being disposed of is reduced, the UK will face fines of up to £180 million a year by 2020 for not being able to meet its EU targets.

The EU’s Renewable Energy Directive will cost the UK £50 bn a year, every year, for the next 40 years. The Directive sets the UK the target of sourcing 15% of its energy from renewable energy sources by 2020, up from 1.3% in 2005.

9th - Final salary pension schemes in the private sector could be wiped out by controversial EU rules. Under new regulations firms will be forced to plough even more money into schemes to cover future liabilities. They will also have to invest more into bonds and gilts rather than shares and equities which give a better return.

Research has found that the UK contributes £135m a year to the pensions of EU officials. We also pay £22m for the private education of their children.

9th - The EU Directive 89/696 for Personal Protective Equipment requires Wellington boots to be sold with a 24-page manual in ten languages giving advice on risk assessment, storage conditions, life expectancy, washing instructions and resistance to electricity, cold weather and oil. Users are advised to try each boot before use.

12th - UKIP MEP Marta Andreasen has criticised the Spanish for their Coastal Law which has resulted in the demolition of so many homes belonging to English people. The Spanish government has promised to debate it with a view to reforming it drastically.

12th - EU trained nurses will be allowed to work in Britain without any safety checks because the EU have said Britain is breaking EU law on freedom of movement for workers from the Continent by insisting on competence exams.

13th - France has voted to ban the burka from being worn in public places.

14th - Portugal has had its credit rating downgraded from AA2 to A1, Ireland from AA1 to AA2 and Hungary has also had theirs downgraded.

17th - Cathy Ashton, the EU’s foreign minister, is to be given a special seat in the United Nation’s assembly chamber alongside a new EU UN ambassador with “the right to speak in a timely manner, the right of reply, the right to circulate documents, the right to make proposals and submit amendments and the right to raise points of order.” William Hague, the foreign secretary, was forced to back down and accept the plan as part of the creation of a Brussels diplomatic service under the Lisbon Treaty.

19th - Romania has granted citizenship rights to ethnic Romanians living in the former Soviet republic of Moldova. More than 120,000 already have Romanian passports and 800,000 are understood to have applied. 10,000 applications are being processed every month.

21st - Open Europe has issued a list of 100 EU regulations that are the most costly to implement with the Working Time Directive heading the list at £38,489 million to date followed by the Climate Change Act which will cost £28,232 million by 2020.

23rd - The EU has spent 13.8m euros (£11.7m) on research which reached the unsurprising conclusion that fruit is good for you. They are also spending 4.2 million promoting the consumption of mushrooms.

27th - In a speech in Turkey, David Cameron promised to fight to help Turkey achieve its goal of EU membership, which would give its 70 million population the right to come to Britain.

27th - A Roma gipsy campaigning for gipsy rights, helped 368 Romanians to apply for NI numbers which would entitle them to benefits. 172 of them claimed a total of £2.9 million before the scam was uncovered. In a separate case, the leaders of a Romanian gipsy gang have been arrested in Romania for sending 200 children to beg and steal on Britain’s streets. A police spokesman said that a Roma gipsy crimewave started almost as soon as Romania joined the EU.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has ordered all Roma people who have committed public order offences to be expelled from France and to dismantle all illegal camps. [Why doesn’t Britain do this? Ed].

31st - Quentin Letts, writing in the Daily Mail, says: “Whitehall has finally admitted that it is forced by law, on pain of fines, to boost European Union propaganda and fly the European flag. Until now, civil servants have been coy about confessing we may not even choose nowadays which flags to run up our state flagpoles. The Coalition is proving far more open about such matters. William Hague wants everyone to know about this outrage. His Foreign Office this week disclosed that we are compelled to fly the European flag and promote the EU logo owing to something called EC Regulation 1828/2006, Articles 7(2) and 9.”