Germany's Constitutional Court is due to rule today on whether the Lisbon Treaty is unconstitutional under German law.
There is very little chance of the Constitutional Court ruling that the EU not-a-constitution is unconstitutional but they may take the opportunity to have a dig at not-a-communist Merkel handing over more German sovereignty to the European Empire.
UKIP's by-election campaign in Norwich North is in full swing. Today UKIPs substantial billboard and telephone kiosk advertising went up all around Norwich. All help is now required to fight a strong campaign which is going to be hotly contested by lots of candidates. 
Walsall Council has been forced to do an embarrassing U turn over controversial plans to part privatise the town’s historic outdoor market.
Members of Walsall Council’s cabinet confirmed last night (Wednesday, June 23) that its joint venture market management model with Norton & Proffitt is no longer on the table.
The significant move follows a long running campaign by market traders and UKIP MEP Mike Nattrass who were completely opposed to the partial sell-off of Walsall’s outdoor market.
In May, Mr Nattrass joined market traders to stage a protest against Walsall Council’s bid to part privatise the market.
Now Walsall Council has halted the move and will now undertake a borough-wide markets review to look at ‘all options’ for their development and management.
Members of the cabinet also approved plans to instruct the submission of a planning application to facilitate the temporary move of Walsall Market to a prime site on The Bridge.
Mr Nattrass said: “I very much welcome the council’s decision – members of the council have at long last seen sense and listened to the market traders.
“It is our campaign that has forced Walsall Council to go back to the drawing board.
“The market is an important part of Walsall’s rich heritage. It is a tradition which stretches back to 1220 and it should be run by the people of the borough.
“The council should never have tried to push this part privatisation of the market forward. The whole sorry saga has been deeply distressing for the market traders who are a credit to the town.
“I now urge the council to urgently carry out its borough-wide markets review and I welcome the temporary move of the market to The Bridge.”
Karen Sands, from Walsall Market Traders Association, said: “I would like to thank Mike Nattrass for his support during what has been a very difficult time for the market traders.
“The move to The Bridge will be fantastic and will boost trade in the area. We did not want the sell-off and hopefully, following the markets review, it will never be considered again.
“Our campaign led to this U-turn – it is a victory for customer power and a victory for the town.”
In a debate in the House of Lords on 23rd June, the UKIP Peer, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, supported by independent Labour Peer, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, clashed with the Government over its statement on the recent EU summit. Lord Pearson chided Baroness Royall of Blaisdon, (for the Government) for suggesting that the European Parliament has any democratic legitimacy. Lord Pearson said: "After all, the majority of law which is now imposed on this country is proposed in secret by the European Commission and passed in secret by the Council, and this Parliament can do nothing about it".A Harris Interactive poll conducted for the Metro newspaper predicts UKIP to pick up 8% of the vote in a general election.
The poll shows the extent to which Liebour's support has been decimated with a 31% swing from Liebour to other parties. According to the poll, 8% of people who said they would vote UKIP in a general election voted for Liebour in 2005, another 8% voted for the Lib Dims and 5% voted Tory.
With just under a year with which to campaign and expose the fundamental dishonesty of David Camoron's Conswervative & (European) Unionist Party, UKIP is already in a strong position. The second Irish vote on the EU not-a-constitution in October will make the European Empire even more important an issue and the back-peddling that Camoron will have to do if the EU not-a-constitution comes into force before the election will be an enjoyable display of electoral suicide.
With the way Liebour has rigged the electoral system to enable them to gain maximum seats from a minimum of votes, we could see a hung parliament with UKIP holding the balance of power. Watching Camoron sharing the front bench with "swivel-eyed loons" would be most amusing.
Forget about the recession, the swine flu pandemic, rising unemployment, banks collapsing, people trafficking and all those other minor issues, the European Empire certainly has its priorities right:
While on the subject of ridiculous suggestions from the EU, The Sun also highlighted a plan to protect the UK's zebra population...
The article read:
ZEBRAS will get a BARCODE to keep them safe from thieves as part of the latest EU crackdown, it was revealed yesterday.
The African wild animals are already born with unique black-and-white stripes. But under the new rule, every foal will be implanted with a microchip.
Using supermarket-type scanners, its barcode can then be matched to a "passport" number to see if the creature has been stolen.
UKIP leader Nigel Farage said: "I wasn't even aware we had a problem with stolen African wild zebras roaming the streets of our cities."
Defra was yesterday unable to say whether any zebras had recently been nicked but insisted the scheme would "reduce fraud and control diseases".
(Hat-tip: UKIP)
mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://link.mail2web.com/mail2web
British elections are known, just like American ones, for the boring consistency with which the two main parties dominate the results. Sure, there’s the occasional socialist from Vermont, perhaps a Liberal Democrat wins a seat in some strange part of England. But we know in our heart of hearts that it’s always going to be either the Republicans (on my side of the pond, Conservatives) or the Democrats (Labour) that’s actually going to gain the power.
Even when this doesn’t hold, like when Ross Perot nearly broke through, we know that next election it’ll all return to the status quo ante. There just doesn’t seem to be any way for a political organisation to stay viable long enough, to keep the activists engaged between elections, so that a partial breakthrough or a partial success can be built upon two or four years later (with the exception of the Celtic parties in Wales and Scotland, something of a special case).
Until this election just gone past in the UK, that is. I’m a member of a smaller party called UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence Party). Our defining policy is that we simply don’t want to be part of this federal European superstate that is being built, what you would probably know as the European Union. It’s not that we’re “Little Englanders” as the pejoratives have it, rather that we’re Great Britons. We have the fifth (or depending upon how you measure it, sixth) largest economy in the world, we’ve a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, we’ve connections and contacts all over the world. We’ve cousins and relatives all around, our head of state, Queen Elizabeth II is also the head of state of some 18 or so other nations, ranging from tiny Grenada to Australia, New Zealand and Canada. We just don’t need to shelter under some umbrella of European countries, most of which would impose social democracy upon us in a heartbeat.
We’re all in favour of trading with our neighbours, of course, but also of trading freely with the rest of the big wide world. We’ll co-operate with anyone, anywhere, when we both desire to and think that it’ll be in our interest. We just don’t think that full blown political union with 26 other European countries is needed to enable this. I should also add that we’re not anti-Europe (I myself live in Portugal which would be a strange thing for someone uncomfortable with foreign climes to do) nor are we xenophobic. We just don’t like the extant and proposed political structure.
Having given the party advertisement (and don’t worry about my hitting you up for contributions, as in the U.S., non-citizens cannot donate to campaigns) now for the boasting. UKIP was set up in 1993 and was very definitely seen as a minority affair. In 1999 we won three seats in the European Parliament. There are two reason as to why the EU Parliament, rather than the Westminster one. Firstly, we’re seen as a single issue party (rightly or wrongly) and it tends to be the European elections when our issue gets aired. The second is that the electoral system is different. Westminster elects as you do to Congress, one congresscritter per district. In the European ones, the country is divided into regions and then each party runs a list of candidates for the region. For example, in the SE region of England there are 10 seats and 15 parties put up candidates for them. The more votes each party had the more of their list of 10 candidates got elected. You can see how this worked out here. The net effect is to make it a great deal easier for the so called “minor” parties to win seats.
However, it’s not quite right to think of UKIP as a minor party any more. In 1999 we won those three seats, in 2004 (elections are every 5 years) we won 12. That was our breakthrough, our Ross Perot moment. Back in January this year we were entirely written off. The Times (the London one) said that we had “imploded” and the feeling was pretty general. We were on 7% in the polls, as against the 16% and a bit we had had in 2004. The only people who didn’t feel this way were us, those inside the party. We know that for most of the time we fight like cats in a sack but come election time we’re a great deal more disciplined. We started our campaign with the belief that we could maintain our position as the third party, ahead of the Liberal Democrats, the position we had gained in 2004.
There was one little wrinkle of the way the UK works that bolstered this. In an election campaign the BBC promises to give equal time to the three parties that came top the last time the same election was held. So we were going to be there at the top table with Labour and the Conservatives. And this indeed did have an effect.
The end result was that we not just came third, we came second, beating the ruling Labour Party into third place. Not bad for a so called “fringe party,” eh?
It wasn’t just the BBC effect, of course. Some say it was the way in which the troughing of Westminster politicians was revealed, we benefitted from a “none of the above” feeling. But our own suspicion, the reactions we were getting while actively campaigning, was that most share our desire to leave, or at least radically change our relationship with, the European Union. So much so that we think our vote would have been higher if there hadn’t been the “expenses scandal” that so dominated the campaign.
My own role was working in the press office, preparing releases and so on. The usual sort of humdrum stuff that is the meat and drink of any political campaign. The interesting part was when I was ghosting newspaper articles: I’ve been a 42-year-old party leader with a passion for sea angling, a 62-year-old ex-telecomms salesman, and even an Argentine/Spanish female accountant. PJ O’Rourke was right when he said that trying to copy the writing style of others teaches you more about your own style than anything else can. As a purely personal point, I think the 1,000 word piece I did on politics as our female accountant for the Daily Sport was the high point. A Thousand words is rather more than they usually have in the entire paper! (think the sadly departed Weekly World News without the intellectual content, combined with the Sport‘s advertising slogan “More nipples than any other daily paper!”) Happy days, happy memories!
Of course we’re proud of what we achieved, we raised our vote, won an extra seat and kept the flag of euroscepticism flying. But what has been rather overlooked so far is what we managed in the larger scheme of things. As I say above, there have been insurgent campaigns in both American and British national politics, but they’ve never lasted to the next electoral cycle. That’s what we’ve managed, we’ve been able to keep the party alive and together over three electoral cycles. We’re now an inescapable part of the electoral landscape, and it’s the first time anyone has done that in either country since the emergence of the Labour Party in Britain in the early 20th century.
I can’t claim all the credit for this, of course, in fact am too English to be comfortable claiming any. But I’m damned proud to have taken part, both chuffed and puffed that we managed to do what has been so often threatened but not achieved for over a century, we broke the mold of politics.
You see, the EU can't even manage a one-size-fits-all treaty to make a one-size-fits-all European Empire.EU agrees Irish treaty compromise
EU leaders have agreed a deal they hope will secure the Lisbon Treaty a "Yes" vote in a second Irish referendum.Ireland won legally-binding assurances that Lisbon would not affect Irish policies on military neutrality, taxes and abortion, diplomats said.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said leaders had agreed to Irish demands that the guarantees would be given the status of a treaty "protocol".
But he stressed it would not affect the other 26 member countries.
Tory 'smokescreen' letter
THE letter from Conservative councillors Acraman & Worth (A&W), was unbelievably misinformed, prejudiced and highly offensive to me as the UKIP candidate and to the residents of Burgess Hill who voted for me.
A textbook example of the Tory Party trying to use a smokescreen to hide its true (Pro-EU) colours.Throughout the letter, A&W try to equate UKIP with the BNP. Completely untrue! UKIP is a mainstream political party, which came second in the EU elections. UKIP is quite distinct from the BNP. A&W also claim the consequences of voting UKIP were the election of Lib-Dems.
I would say the election of the Lib-Dems is down to the many Eurosceptic Tories that mistakenly continue to support the Pro-EU Tory party rather than the genuinely Eurosceptic UKIP.
With the subtlety of a charging, rhino A&W also attempt to put UKIP and BNP in the same political category when summarising the total votes cast in Mid Sussex. A&W list all the other political parties' votes separately and then pathetically lump UKIP & BNP together.
The most outrageous comment, however, came when A&W wrote: 'in Burgess Hill West, 476 loyal BNP folk allowed the election by just 50 of another Lib-Dem'. How incredibly offensive and prejudiced of A&W to assume that the 476 UKIP voters in Burgess Hill are 'loyal BNP folk'.
On behalf of those 476 good people of Burgess Hill and myself, I demand an immediate apology from A&W for such a comment.
Chris French
UKIP County council candidate
Burgess Hill Town
Firtoft Close, Burgess Hill
UKIP MEP Mike Nattrass has today expressed his concern at an EU ban on people being allowed their final wish, to be cremated in a football shirt.UK 'powerless' to stop EU regulation
A senior French official has confirmed Gordon Brown is almost powerless to stop the creation of a European regulatory machinery at today's EU summit, opening the way for a transfer of control over the City from London to Brussels.
"There will be a pincer movement on Britain," said a key aide to President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking at a pre-summit briefing.
Paris believes the push for tighter regulation by the Obama administration leaves Britain in a weak position as it tries to fight off the assault on the City.
"If the Americans make strong commitments towards regulation and on derivatives and other sophisticated products, I believe they are going further than the Europeans. That will provide a boost to the most determined among the Europeans," said the official.
"It will be a reminder to the British that they cannot be quite isolated within Europe and at the same time refuse to accept for the City the kind of rules being imposed on Wall Street. "
Europe's key proposal is for three new bodies to oversee banking, insurance and securities. Each would rank as EU "authorities" and have binding powers to dictate decisions over sweeping areas of regulation.
Britain cannot veto the proposals because EU single market laws are passed by qualified majority voting (QMV). While a few countries have reservations – Germany views the plan as "too ambitious" – London will struggle to put together a blocking minority.
It would be a serious political matter if the EU proceeded against vehement objections from the British Government. Any outcome depends on whether Mr Brown is willing to risk a showdown with Europe.
Chancellor Alistair Darling said Britain will not agree to any measures that erode "fiscal sovereignty", an area that is still covered by the national veto.
UKIP's Lord Willoughby de Broke has introduced the Constitutional Reform Bill 2009 into the House of Lords which, if hell freezes over and the LibLabCon pass it, would:
The practical effect of the Bill would be to withdraw the UK from the European Empire and make the protection of fundamental human rights the job of our own constitutional statutes - the Bill of Rights, Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, etc..
All in all the Bill is concise and well written, although it fails to address devolution properly so the Scottish Parliament and Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies would remain but power would be devolved to local authorities in England which could never hope to compete with one of the national assemblies.
I Lord Willoughby de Broke the best of luck with his Constitutional Reform Bill but I won't my breath on it getting past the first reading.
Does it remain an important objective for Britain to find itself in the same currency as that single market in which it interacts? Obviously yes.
Important objective for who Mandy? Not for me and not for the vast majority of the electorate who would rather return to bartering with livestock than replace the pound with the Euro.No one can serve two masters, because either he will hate one and love the other, or be loyal to one and despise the other.Mandelson serves two masters - the British government and the European Empire. So where does his loyalty lie and who does he love and hate? I think we all know the answer to that question.
Matthew 6:24
David Camoron has banned Tories from publicly opposing the UK's membership of the European Empire via the Better Off Out campaign. Supporters of Better Off Out are not allowed to be PPCs, MPs that sign the Better Off Out pledge face losing the Tory whip and any MP who was already a signatory before the ban was introduced is banned from sitting on the front bench.The events that took place in the Netherlands yesterday seem not to comply with the spirit of the European elections. They're supposed to go beyond the purely national aspects. If we want citizens to understand the European nature of these elections, we think it's absolutely essential that we release the results in all countries at the same time, also in order not to influence the vote in the countries which have not voted yet – and that at the moment is 25 out of the 27 member states.Amadeu Altafaj is absolutely right, of course, the decision by the Dutch government to comply with Dutch law and publish details of the elections doesn't comply with the spirit of the European elections, the objective of which is to undermine national identity and sovereignty. If the Dutch government had any balls they'd tell this unelected Belgian civil servant that the Dutch government makes the rules in the Netherlands but of course that isn't the case any more, the Dutch government have accepted the primacy of European law over domestic law the same as the British government have.
The Seabridge and Wolstanton wards of Newcastle Borough Council both became vacant after the incumbent Tory councillors had to resign after one of them attended only 10% of committee meetings and the other was investigated (and subsequently found guilty) by the standards committee for abusing his position after the council wrote off thousands of pounds of business rates he owed to them.
The Tories kept the Seabridge seat but lost the Wolstanton seat to the UKIP candidate, Dave Woolley. UKIP now has 5 seats on Newcastle Borough Council.
The Dutch also went to the polls yesterday and their exit polls are showing a surprisingly strong showing for Geert Wilders' Freedom Party which stood in the EU elections for the first time yesterday. The anti-Islam, anti-immigration, marginally eurosceptic (roughly akin to the vague euroscepticism of the Tories) Freedom Party looks to have come second on the Dutch EU election, not far behind the incumbent Christian Democrats headed up by Dutch PM, Jan Peter Balkenende (or Harry Potter as he is affectionately known).
wonkotsane is an author at Bloggers4UKIP.
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