Cameron on the rack over Panama Papers
The papers keep up the pressure on the Prime Minister, suggesting that his “carefully worded statement” on his tax affairs may fail to end speculation. In particular they draw attention to his studied use of the present tense. He does not exclude the possibility that he or his family members may have benefited in the past, or may benefit in the future, from funds held in off-shore tax havens. His “Put up or shut up” comment makes the headlines – but maybe he needs to take his own advice.
The Telegraph headlines: “PM Panama mystery deepens: Cameron’s carefully worded statement may not end speculation”. The Mirror devotes its front page to a headline “How many people think you’ve come clean about tax, PM?”.
As I said yesterday, this is not directly a referendum issue (surprising perhaps that rather few EU big-wigs seem to be mentioned in the Panama Papers). But to the extent that it tends to discredit the Prime Minister, it may also undermine his Remain campaign.
“Jihadists flooding in amongst Migrants”
The Mail headlines “Staggering number of European Jihadists: EU’s own agency admits terrorists are exploiting migrant crisis as illegal border crossings hit 1.82 million”. (Question: how come we can count them, but we can’t stop them? And how accurate is the count?). It quotes the EU Border Agency Frontex as saying that the Paris attacks proved that terrorists were exploiting the migrant crisis. Frontex admitted that it had no clear idea of how many illegal migrants there were in total in the EU, and had no way of tracing their movements within the EU.
The Mail also reports a new ECJ decision which could prevent the UK from deporting criminals within the EU.
The Express focuses on the raw numbers: “Illegal migrants flooding into the EU: record 1.8 border breaches in one year”, helpfully adding that this represents a six-fold increase on the previous year. It quotes Matthew Elliott of Vote Leave saying: “The EU is an outdated institution and is incapable of solving the global problems that it faces. Britain pays £350million a week to Brussels and is rewarded by losing control of its borders. The only safe option in light of the EU’s inability to deal with the migrant crisis is to vote leave”. The Telegraph also covers the story, speaking of “porous borders” which mean we can never hope to control incoming terrorists.
Port Talbot rescue?
The FT reports that Sanjeev Gupta of Liberty House has a plan to rescue the Port Talbot steelworks – but it would involve closing the blast furnaces. And he sets out stiff terms for government assistance. But Mr. Gupta expresses confidence in the rolling mills and downstream businesses, and hopes to be able to protect jobs in the business, saying he would only proceed on that basis. The same story is carried in the “i”.
Today’s Dutch Referendum
The Times reports that Dutch voters are set “to give the EU a bloody nose” in today’s referendum on the proposed EU/Ukraine deal. The story features a picture of Nigel Farage campaigning in Holland earlier this week. If the Dutch give Brussels a bloody nose today, let’s make sure that the Brits deliver the coup de grace in June. More news tomorrow.
Radical Clerics in Islamic schools in Britain
The Times reports that schools run by the UK’s largest Islamic sect are to be investigated after ministers expressed concerns at reports that a radical cleric and terrorist sympathisers had been active.
First day of deportations goes quietly
We were told that maybe 750 migrants – or perhaps “less than 500” — would be deported from the Greek islands to Turkey on the first day of deportations under the EU/Turkey deal. Al Jazeera (and the Guardian) report that the actual figure was 202, almost none of whom were Syrians. But ominously, a local official is quoted as saying “These were the easy ones”. Trouble is anticipated when Syrians currently in detention centres on the islands are moved.
Al Jazeera is also very critical of the process, arguing that the EU is not solving the problem, but simply relocating it. If thousands of refugees in Greece constitute a crisis, asks Al Jazeera, how is that less of a crisis if they are moved to Turkey? OK, guys. But it’s less of an EU problem.
Roger Helmer MEP 
In respect of the immigration crisis, caused by Merkel and the leaders of the EU experiment, you cite Al Jazeera being “very critical of the process, arguing that the EU is not solving the problem, but simply relocating it. If thousands of refugees in Greece constitute a crisis, asks Al Jazeera, how is that less of a crisis if they are moved to Turkey?” and add, “OK, guys. But it’s less of an EU problem.”
It isn’t ok though Roger, and for two reasons: first, the problem was already “relocated” from their various middle eastern and African countries, when all these immigrants pushed into Europe, while EU leaders did nothing, and some, along with Merkel, invited them into Europe, as if it were their back yard!
Second, it is less of a crisis in Turkey than in Greece, not only because Greece is in Europe, and the EU, but because Turkey, unlike Greece, is a muslim country,,,and almost every one of these migrants are muslims. Greece already have more than their share of problems, not helped by the EU, without entitled ansd demanding muslims adding to them!
George Eustace MP (Con) interviewed by BBC R4 journo/babble head Sarah Montague today. Eustace talking about getting control back and farmers subsidies etc. He used the odd “might” here and there, as in better prospect. So the babble brain picks him up on using the word …might. ooer, you said might? Does that for the EU spat, but for climate change BS…Nope!
Anyway, whatever it is right/wrong or causation…Putin did it or knows a friend who did.
Tell It As It Is Alert
“Former Thatcher Advisor Blasts Obama Over EU Intervention: ‘Americans, Try And Explain To Your President We Are Fighting OUR War of Independence”
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/04/06/former-thatcher-advisor-blasts-obama-over-eu-intervention/
Keep in mind that Thatcher is at fault for everything..as is Putin remember?
Cameron was blathering again: – Britain’s choice: economic security with the EU, or a leap into the dark
He opens with “Imagine a world where a British airline wasn’t allowed to fly between Rome and Paris”.
Richard North in his typically precise way points out that this is the use of fifth freedom rights which have to be agreed between the two Countries, it is not bestowed by the EU. A fifth freedom right permits an air carrier to pick up passengers at an enroute transit then drop them at another point of call.
In this day and age it would rarely be used. Back in the 1960’s and early 70’s with a low frequency of flights between UK – Australia and the Far East, also the limited range of aircraft it was advantageous for BOAC and the Continental carriers to use this facility.
With the increase in the number of carriers, the frequency of flights, longer range aircraft, flights are now point to point. There is no need for the use of fifth freedom and was never implemented between the UK and North America, where we now have the ‘freedom of the Skies’ agreement.
Cameron has it wrong again, leaving the EU makes no difference. He must have the same duff source as Richard Branson.
“We are doing everything we can to help British steel in these difficult times, but the idea that leaving Europe is the answer is a dangerous fallacy: more than half of our steel exports go to Europe”.
How much steel do we import from the EU Mr Cameron? In January, the last month for official figures, the UK imported £202m of steel from the rest of the EU and only £80m from the Rest of the world, which included China who exports to the EU without being a member.
“They want to rip up our membership of the single market – a market that Britain practically invented – in the hope of renegotiating a new arrangement”. Carry on and explain Mr Cameron that the market we pioneered in EFTA was a free trade agreement, the single market has morphed into a full blown Political Union aiming at becoming the EUSSR. That very same Political Union you claim to have exempted your self from with those three little words ‘ever closer union’. The world he claims to have carved out is remote from the other 27 memmbers.
John Redwood today ‘The single market is not the same as free trade’.
The number 10 propaganda factory keeps getting it wrong, it is one lie after another.
Like his mentor, he likes to work on the principle of the lie that goes halfway around the world before the truth can get it’s boots on. That way it’s the lie that always gets remembered even if the truth later emerges.
Presumably “difficult times” refers to the fact that our large industries pay almost double the European mean for electricity, >9p/Kwhr as against <5p/Kwhr for Germany and the rest. Difficult times indeed, in fact it's a wonder any industries are left in the UK at all. I expect he finds it all rather puzzling despite his reputed giant size brain.
http://www.thegwpf.com/uk-steel-crisis-gwpf-calls-on-government-to-scrap-unilateral-climate-policies/
Cameron on the rack – has a rather nice sound to it. About time too.
I believe the rack was traditionally the stage before drawing and quartering…
I’m not getting Cameron’s logic here, “We are doing everything we can to help British steel in these difficult times”……but the difficult times are caused by EU directives are they not?
So leaving the EU and it’s propensity to meddle and mess up the status quo is a no brainer isn’t it?
Or did he miss the lessons on cause and effect at his elite place of learning?
“I’m not getting Cameron’s logic here”
Hardly surprising, as he hasn’t got any logic, just a bunch of claptrap.
Roger knows why we have all this problem with energy costs, its because politicians do not have a proper education and believe everything the PC scientists and the greens tell them and they want to be PC too.
GWPF has the following: – Computer Models are Powerful — But Often Misused — Tools
The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.__ Freeman Dyson in Edge
Computer model output is not science, and cannot substitute for scientific experimentation. Computer models can only process data, using the assumptions and hypotheses that are force-fed into the model. The output of computer models — once validated — can lead to revolutionary new hypotheses which can be tested by more experiments in the messy, muddy, real world.
“GWPF has the following: – Computer Models are Powerful — But Often Misused — Tools”
Computer
gamesmodels based on physical processes such as radiative physics, thermodynamics and Navier-Stokes equations are not capable of predicting future climate.“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
IPCC Working Group I: The Scientific Basis, Third Assessment Report (TAR), Chapter 14 (final para., 14.2.2.2), p774.
Anyone who claims that a purported
computer gameclimate simulation of an effectively infinitely large open-ended non-linear feedback-driven (where we don’t know all the feedbacks, and even the ones we do know, we are unsure of the signs of some critical ones) chaotic system – hence subject to inter alia extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, strange attractors and bifurcation – is capable of making meaningful predictions over any significant time period is either a charlatan or a computer salesman.Ironically, the first person to point this out was Edward Lorenz – a climate scientist.
Lorenz’s early insights marked the beginning of a new field of study that impacted not just the field of mathematics but virtually every branch of science–biological, physical and social. In meteorology, it led to the conclusion that it may be fundamentally impossible to predict weather beyond two or three weeks with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
Some scientists have since asserted that the 20th century will be remembered for three scientific revolutions–relativity, quantum mechanics and chaos.
http://news.mit.edu/2008/obit-lorenz-0416
You can add as much computing power as you like, the result is purely to produce the wrong answer faster. But for some climate “scientists” I suppose it pays the mortgage…
And damaging policy is constructed on that long string of knife and forking. RIRO
The system functionality under consideration remains inadequately defined. As such no amount of computing can simulate that system. Parsing the past does not indicate the future because the system can revert or indeed amplify under conditions (sequences) that are impossible to identify reliably. ooops..still can’t put my finger on it! But I’ll destroy your life and livelihood when and where I can. It all amounts to a very long line of criminal offences.