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I have to admit that this story really rather puzzles me.
A Sikh man who wanted the right to wear a turban while being photographed for his French drivers’ licence has lost his case in the European Court of Human Rights.
Shingara Mann Singh, a French national, lost a series of appeals in France against the authorities who refused to issue a new licence with a photograph of him wearing a turban.
Under French regulations, motorists must appear ‘bareheaded and facing forward’ in their licence photographs but the Sikh religion requires men to wear a turban at all times.
Mr Singh, 52, took his case to the ECHR but the Strasbourg-based court dismissed the case.
No, not the way that, as always seems to happen, the French go to Strasbourg they get their way and we almost never do (thus showing that European law is very similar to French and very different from our own).
No, it’s something different. Why do the French authorities insist that he be photographed without his turban?
After all, he’s always going to be wearing one so surely that’s what you’d like his ID photo to look like, wouldn’t you?
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This little campaign seems to be getting a little more airplay. The Beeb in Brussels ahs picked it up here.
Derek Clark is a UK Independence Party MEP for the East Midlands. Robert Kilroy Silk’s behaviour is doubly annoying for him.
The former TV presenter was elected as a UKIP MEP in 2004 - but left the party shortly afterwards to found his own Eurosceptic party, Veritas. Six months later he gave up as leader of the fringe party - and now sits as an Independent.
“We think he should resign altogether and give the seat back to us,” Mr Clark told the BBC.
“This chap has taken himself out altogether. ITV won’t let him communicate with anyone in the outside world at just the time he has a job to do. He is being paid and he is not doing his job, simple as that.”
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This little campaign seems to be getting a little more airplay. The Beeb in Brussels ahs picked it up here.
Derek Clark is a UK Independence Party MEP for the East Midlands. Robert Kilroy Silk’s behaviour is doubly annoying for him.
The former TV presenter was elected as a UKIP MEP in 2004 - but left the party shortly afterwards to found his own Eurosceptic party, Veritas. Six months later he gave up as leader of the fringe party - and now sits as an Independent.
“We think he should resign altogether and give the seat back to us,” Mr Clark told the BBC.
“This chap has taken himself out altogether. ITV won’t let him communicate with anyone in the outside world at just the time he has a job to do. He is being paid and he is not doing his job, simple as that.”
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A fun little site just launched this afternoon.
An online petition for people to sign asking Robert Kilroy Silk to step down as an MEP.
www.kilroystepdown.co.uk.
As Sky News puts it:
Keen advocates of the ‘adding insult to injury’ school of thought they’ve now put their name to a petition calling on the Silver Fox to stand down as an MEP.
Oh, what fun they must have had putting the news release together.
“All five of the East Midland’s MEPs (that is, all of the region’s MEPs other than Kilroy Silk himself) are backing an online petition calling for him to stand down,” they write.
MEP Derek Clark then puts the boot in: “Its not just that he hasn’t been working while in the jungle, it’s that he hasn’t spoken in the Parliament since 2005. No one has seen him in the region for years, we even had a competition for anyone who could spot him.”
I have to say I do like that line “keen advocates of the ‘adding insult to injury’ school of thought”…..
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No, really, it is. A website devoted entirely to bacon.
If a story’s got bacon in it they’ll publish it. No bacon, no story as far as they are concerned.
Bacon Today in all it’s porcine goodness.
Remind me, what was it we all did before we had toys like this to play with?
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It’s always very simple to spend other people’s money. And as Milton Friedman pointed out it usually ends up being spent very badly:
There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income.
Now that refers, of course, to our owwn government spending the tax money they extort from us. If we take it up another level, to the money that the European Union spends….
A European package of spending increases and tax cuts said to be worth €200bn (£170bn), or 1.5% of the European Union’s gross domestic product, was unveiled yesterday as the EU’s answer to the swelling financial and economic crisis.
The important point here isn’t the amount of money nor whatever minor fiscal stimulus it will bring. Rather, it’s where the money is coming from.
The commission’s two-year plan is aimed at restoring consumer and business confidence, shoring up employment, getting the banks lending again, and promoting green technologies. It reshuffles EU spending schedules and increases loans from the European Investment Bank (EIB), but leaves the bulk of the extra spending and fiscal stimuli to the 27 member states.
The 27 countries would provide €170bn of the €200bn - or 1.2% of European GDP - while the other €30bn would come from Brussels’ coffers in the form of EIB loans, and accelerating payments from the cohesion and structural funds, which go mainly to the new members in central Europe.
So they’re not announcing that the EU is going to be spending the money the EU already has. Rather, they’re announcing that the EU is going to spend money which the national government’s have to find from the pockets of the taxpayers. That is, an unelected body is telling elected bodies how they should gouge the citizenry.
So, to go back to the four ways to spend money. The fourth method provides the very worst result….and this announcement is of the fourth way squared. Without even the limitations placed by the ballot box upon how the money is splurged.
Given that it’s very difficult indeed to believe that this money will be anything other than entirely wasted….if not spent on things which make matters actively worse.
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This is really rather shaming. I know, I know, I’ll be contrite. But it does pain me to have to admit that I even know about the existence of the newspaper Socialist Worker, let alone that I know where to find it on the web.
But they do have this interesting little graphic.
Based on 500 or so of those names from the BNP list, this is who the BNP are.
There’s nothing amazing there, I agree. Just interesting, that’s all.
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At the bottom of a Times editorial.
Central to the appeal of the new movement was its claim to be economically competent and fiscally prudent, a claim it pursued in office and was, for many years, generally accepted. New Labour believed that wealth creation and social justice depended upon each other. It was, as one of its leaders put it, “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. It determined not to raise the tax rate paid by top earners, for three election this was a manifesto commitment that symbolised how it had come to share the hopes and ambitions of middle class families.
Yesterday Alistair Darling, using the sombre tones appropriate to the occasion, provided Members of Parliament with details of new Labour’s tragic end.
Yes, yes, OK, so another group of politicians have been shown to be know nothings….but then the comment:
So the New Labour model was finally tested and found to be defective. Faced with a return to old Labour or the conservatives I know which way I would go… UKIP
Rex Lester, Surbiton, UK
Rex, as and when you’re in central London, allow me to buy you a pint would you?
Dang, I’ve spent years working on how to write, how to get a point across, and here I am entirely outclassed by someone who simply speaks his mind. D’ye think I might have to spring for the second round as well?
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But even so the message still gets across.
Of course, we all remember Gerard Batten’s report of last week on the costs of the EU. We do, that is. (I obviously do as I was running around with Robert Oulds trying to get people to write about it ….after Gerard’s done all that work it’s worth trying to get a bit of coverage.)
And of course we’d all be thrilled if all the newspapers wrote up the report, name checked Gerard, mentioned UKIP and so on. Which, sadly, of course they don’t. But that’s only one side of this whole political game. Sure, we want our party to win, we want our party to get lots of publicity.
But we also want to get our message across. Yes, of course it’s better if the message and the party are linked but getting just the message across is still a win.
All of which is a lead up to this column in The Sun. What should we be doing about the current financial and economic problems? What’s the very first suggestion for concrete action?
Let’s have a referendum on leaving the EU (saving: �65billion a year).
No, they don’t mention us or Gerard. But in only a week that figure that he calculated has become a generally accepted fact in Britain’s largest selling daily newspaper.
We’ll accept that as a victory for getting the message across I think?
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It’s rather nice to see all these newspaper reports about cutting VAT. Almost none of them fail to make the point that 15% is the minimum that we can cut it to because of EU rules. That is, that we don’t in fact control our own tax levels.
However, there’s one more point it might be worthwhile to get across.
According to the Telegraph, the cut “could save the average family as much as £10 a week.
£10 week eh?
It’s generally accepted that CAP costs the average household an extra £25 a week on top of what food prices would be in the absence of CAP. So let’s get out of the EU, abolish CAP and benefit the average household by two and a half times more than this £12.5 billion a year borrowing splurge will cost us.
Plus, of course, abolishing CAP will cost us nothing.
I assume that the only reason more people don’t propose this is because the modern education system has left people incapable of doing simple arithmetic.
