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Andrew’s railroading continues:
Andrew Symeou, 19, from north London, was arrested by British police on June 26 after Greek authorities issued a European Arrest Warrant.
The case has reopened a debate about the warrants, which were introduced without fanfare in 2002 and which allow any European Union citizen to be extradited to face trial in another EU country without evidence being heard in a domestic court.
Mr Symeou, who was remanded on £20,000 bail paid by his mother Helen, and had his passport seized, is wanted in connection with the death of another British holidaymaker, 18-year-old Jonathan Hiles from Cardiff, who died after an incident at the Rescue nightclub on Zante on 20 July 2007. He was allegedly punched, fell off a stage and cracked his skull when he hit the floor.
Mr Symeou, a student at Bournemouth University, denies the charge and says he was not even in the nightclub until three hours after the incident.
Mr Hiles, 18, who had represented the Great Britain roller hockey team and played ice hockey for Cardiff Devils’ junior team, was taken to hospital in Athens where he died on 22 July 2007.
Mr Symeou, from Enfield, north London, has never been interviewed by Greek police. If he is extradited he could spend 18 months in Greece awaiting for trial for an offence that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.
The European Commission says the introduction of European Arrest Warrants has been “made possible by a high level of mutual trust and co-operation between countries who share the same highly-demanding conception of the rule of law”.
But critics claim that widely-varying standards of criminal justice within the EU will inevitably lead to miscarriages of justice.
New laws approved recently by the European Parliament, but still to be ratified by member states, will make the extradition process almost automatic - even if the individual has already been convicted and sentenced at a trial at which he was not present.
The first and primary duty of any system of government is to protect the country itself from invasion. The second is to protect the rights of the citizens from a similar such invasion. That clearly and obviously includes protecting the rights of those accused to a fair trial.
Our current system doesn’t do that, as we can see above. So it would be entirely fair to say that our corrent system of government, where 80% and more of our laws come from Brussels, has failed.
About time we went back to a system that actually worked, that did protect our rights, don’t you think?
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So imagine the consternation now felt at the British Council, one of the most politically correct organisations on earth, at the results of its survey of young people in both Britain and Italy.
A large majority felt that excessive immigration was threatening their national identity, many thought it was threatening the jobs of domestic workers and only seven per cent of the British young people questioned felt themselves to be citizens of Europe.
So when will the Government wake up to the opinion of that 93% and take us out of that citizenship of Europe?
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A couple of days ago I pointed to a blog post which told us that you can be better off on benefits than you might be in work. One newspaper that has got this point is The Express. Here and here, they lay out what is actually happening.
The basic problem, from an economic point of view, is that the tax and the benefit systems overlap. You can be both paying income tax and also getting tax credits and other benefits. So when you income rises just a little bit, you can lose more in tax and the loss of benefits than you gain by the extra income.
There are essentially three ways out of this bind. We can abolish the welfare system…which of course no one wants to do. Change it perhaps, but no, no one is advocating that we simply allow people to starve in the streets.
Or we can spend a great deal more money on the system, money that we don’t have.
Or we can be sensible and simply not tax those working poor in the first place. That reduces the marginal tax rates so that those who do go out to work, those who get a better job, or who do some overtime, get a better income by doing so.
That sensible and simple solution is of course the one that we in UKIP propose.
Raise the personal allowance to £10,000 and a lot of these problems simply go away.
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The cost of educating a child in the state system is greater than in many private schools, it has been claimed.
Fee-paying schools work out cheaper because millions of pounds of public money is being spent on bureaucracy, a headteachers’ leader said.
And he warned that, despite the huge sums being pumped into state schooling, ‘an awful lot of money never gets close to a child’s education’.
It’s not as if people don’t know this. Some people at least….but it does go to show the most important point about the spending of taxpayers’ money. It isn’t how much you spend that is important to the result, it’s how you spend it.
For example, the Finnish school system is usually pointed to as the best in the world. They spend less per pupil than we do. However, they also spend it differently: there’s a pretty rigid line between schools that teach academic subjects and those that teach vocational ones. You know, not comprehensive education, but something more like our own past system of grammars and secondary moderns.
Which is, of course, why we have a policy in favour of such a system.
As ever, we’re delighted to learn things from our fellow Europeans….it’s the political entity which is the European Union that we’re against.
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It’s easy enough to go overboard with the claims that the various greenies are simply fascists, if of an eco- kind. Yes, they do want to force us all to live as they determine we must and yes, they do seem to have a temptation to use the most oppressive State measures to make us do so.
But to be honest, at least when I sling around such accusations, a lot of it is hyperbole. It’s a way of getting up their noses, of ridiculing their pretensions, rather than a real comparison of them with Mussolini and his Black Shirts.
Well, at least usually it is.
Residents of the planned eco towns in England could face strict monitoring of their travel habits, home insulation and even wasted food, to ensure they are truly living a “green” lifestyle.
Experts advising the government on its plans to build up to 10 eco towns by 2020, yesterday called for ministers to toughen environmental standards for the developments with monitoring to ensure their carbon footprint is three times smaller than the British average.
The recommendation is that there should be detailed scrutiny of the number of trips residents make by car, and the types of waste produced by households and businesses. Thermographic cameras should be used to check which homes lose heat, according to the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe).
The monitoring plans are part of the proposed standards for the government’s flagship housing programme, which has been criticised for failing to demand the highest levels of sustainability.
I’m all in favour of the idea that we might tread more lightly upon this Earth even as I criticise the methods offered to help us do so. But do we really need to have block captains monitoring our every move?
That really is getting a little close to fascism, isn’t it?
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The idea that blogs need to be regulated at a European level has been defeated. At least for now, but we all know they’ll be back for more. Bad ideas never die in the EU, do they?
Charles Crawford explains the idea in all its awfulness, here.
Quite simply, neither you nor I, nor anyone else for that matter, needs the permission of the European Unions to express our opinions. There’s an end to it.
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Yes, they’re an expensive nonsense, they won’t solve any problems except to remove even more of our liberty than we’re already losing. But then we find that behind it all is the European Union. Trixy has the details here.
Nigel’s quoted on it too.
Officials said the image of a bull represented the Greek myth in which Zeus turns himself into a bull and abducts Europa, a beautiful princess.
Campaigners said it was bizarre that there not more outward symbols of Britishness on the card, given that it will be used as a proof of residence.
Lorraine Mulally, spokesman for campaigners Open Europe, said: “The use of EU symbols, instead of national ones, is part of a wider attempt to promote the idea of a common European citizenship, which EU federalists have been pushing for some time. The Government seems happy to buy into this.”
Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party, added: “A British ID card without a British flag on it? Instead we have the symbol of Europa, and we know what Zeus did to her.
“We don’t need or want ID cards in the first place, free people in a free country don’t require them. But to have the European Union thrust down our throats at the same time is simply a load of old bull.”
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We’ve always known that teh continental economies are run rather differently from our own. We’ve also always known that there has been something of a movement to change the way we do things to make it the same way as they do things.
The Rasmussen report was just voted through the European Parliament last week an John Whittaker had this to say about it.
Senior politicians in France and Germany have in recent weeks called for a radical shake-up of the market system. A powerful EU faction that has always been hostile to the City of London – which is known in Brussels as “the casino” – see this crisis as a rare chance to ram through irreversible changes.
“They want to regulate the capital levels of every firm and partnership, limit takeovers and regulate asset stripping. In short, they want to regulate the Anglo-Saxon version of capitalism out of existence,” said John Whittacker, MEP and UKIP’s economic spokesman.
Absolutely John. They just don’t like our way of doing things and they want to force us to change.
Can we leave yet?
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Really, they should have known better.
The Liberal Democrats broke the law by making automated phone calls to supporters during their party conference, despite having been warned that their actions would be likely to breach regulations.
Does that mean we get to throw them all in jail now?
Please?
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As we all know, UKIP’s tax policy is to raise the personal allowance to £10,000 a year. That’s the start of it, of course, but it’sa very important start. As this post shows.
Let’s define wages as the income you get from working, relative to not working.
Then look at table 2.2c (p114) of the latest Tax Benefit Model tables, the DWP’s full description of our tax and benefit system, published today.
This shows that if a single person moves off the dole and into a 16-hour a week job at the minimum wage, he gains just £8.42 a week. That’s a wage of barely 50p an hour.
And if a married couple are unemployed and one takes a part-time minimum wage job, they lose - yes, lose - £6.63 a week. They have negative wages.
No wonder we’ve so many idling on benefits: look at the wages they get if they try to go to work.
We’ll only be able to deal with this by making work pay….and the way to do that is to take the working poor out of the income tax net.