Wednesday 30 September 2015

EU Out - Fund Raising Lunch - Saturday 10th October - two weeks to go!


The Liston Hotel, 5 Wollstonecraft Rd, Bournemouth BH5 1 JQ.

EU Out Fundraising Lunch
+ 2 Speakers
+ Meet BBC's latest reality TV star from 'Close to the Edge' Vanessa Coleman

From 12 noon - 3 p.m. the tickets are £12.50 which includes a buffet lunch, desert, followed by tea/coffee.

Cheques should be made out to UKIP Bournemouth East and to the UKIP shop for the attention of David Hughes at 897 Christchurch Rd, Bournemouth BH7 6AX.

Alternately, you can pay on the day. Email vanessa@radiofreeuk.org to register your interest.

There will be two speakers for you to enjoy:

Steve Unwin - of The Dorset Out Campaign

and

Paul Perrin - Creator and manager of RadioFreeUK.org - the EU indpendence and libertarian supporting internet radio station.

And plenty of other people for you to socialise and network with.

Funds raised will be used to support the EU Out Shop promoting the cause in Bournemouth.




This is the shop in its former guise of the UKIP shop - it is now being transformed to support EU Out Campaign generally.

Ryedale Conservative Councillor called on to resign over offensive jokes

A Conservative councillor in Sherburn, North Yorkshire has been called on to resign after sharing "jokes" on Facebook mocking Muslims, homosexuals and immigrants.

Cllr John Raper has been reported to Ryedale District Council who are unable to hold him to account as the "jokes" were made on his private Facebook profile rather than in his capacity as a councillor.

SNP MP resigns over investigation into business deals with struck off solicitor

Frontbench SNP MP, Michelle Thomson, has resigned the SNP whip after the police launched an investigation into her involvement with a struck off solicitor.

Solicitor Christopher Hales was struck off following a tribunal hearing last year and the Law Society referred the case to the Crown Office formally this year having informally notified them in 2014. He and Michelle Thomson did business together through her property company.

She has resigned as the SNP's business spokesman and will sit as an independent MP until the conclusion of the investigation. Questions are being asked about whether the investigation came to light whilst the SNP were vetting her as a candidate and was covered up.


Tuesday 29 September 2015

Your future as a radio presenter awaits! Almost no work required! Your Station Wants You! http://www.RadioFreeUK.org

Bloggers4UKIP deserves its own podcast! But this needs a voice! Could it be your voice?

I want a weekly item giving a summary of what has been happening here for Radio Free UK - http://www.RadioFreeUK.org

A summary of the posts, summary of the comments, a bit on the issues raised... duration is up to you, but it will probably depend on how much activity there has been here and may vary week to week.

Just like a newspaper review - read through the weeks posts and comments, then talk a bit about them... you could do it with a friend if you like.

Let people know what we are talking about, and encourage them to come here and talk some more!

You can record on a smart phone with a recording app, or on a computer if you want to do a bit of editing/tidying up. You can send me the MP3 or I can give you access to upload it directly to www.RadioFreeUK.org

Your new future dream career awaits!

eMail Me Now: paul@radiofreeuk.org.

ps. A bit of practice to get volume levels etc sorted will probably be required, but this could be a good hobby for someone with a little time!


Monday 28 September 2015

Far left "Class War" extremists vandalise shop and terrify children in Shoreditch

Far left extremists have vandalised a shop in Shoreditch for being too posh and terrorised the customers inside, including a number of children.

The Cereal Killer cafe which sells expensive bowls of cereal to wealthy punters was targeted by masked class warriors campaigning against "gentrification" and nice things other people can afford but they can't. The violent mob smashed windows and threw paint at the shop whilst staff and customers barricaded themselves inside.

You can read for yourself how the far left justify their criminal behaviour on the Guardian website where one of the thugs tells readers that causing criminal damage and terrifying children is ok because lots of Londoners are living in poverty.

Sunday 27 September 2015

Trade unions only manage to get 20 sockpuppets to protest UKIP conference in Doncaster

Just 20 anti-UKIP "protesters" bothered to turn up to the UKIP conference in Doncaster this weekend. The Labour-supporting Mirror newspaper asked the "protesters" why they were there and even helpfully took some paper and a marker pen so the "protesters" could write signs for the photoshoot.

Only one of the "protesters" admitted their political affiliation and the Mirror failed to point out that the whole thing was staged by trade unions, despite the big Unison banner and the "protesters" wearing t-shirts for trade union front organisations.

The first member of the "hardcore band" featured on the Mirror website is Dave Banks who describes his job as "I do car boots". Dave is actually the sales manager for Studio Bentley and a Trade Unions & Socialists Against Cuts Party (TUSC) activist. Dave was part of TUSC candidate, Mev Akram's campaign team during this year's election.


And on the subject of Mev Akram, she was the only member of the "hardcore band" who admitted to being a TUSC candidate. She teaches "skills for life" at the Northern Racing College and describes UKIP as "racist filth". Comrade Mev told potential voters that the TUSC gets all its funding from "people like me and you" but according to the Electoral Commission they accepted £81,000 in cash donations from the Socialist Party and the Socialist Alliance, both of which receive all their funding for one or two wealthy individuals.


Tim Jones also appears on the list. He gives his job as "mental health campaigner" and says that UKIP are "not welcome in Doncaster" and that "racists devides[sic] humanity". Tim is a member of the Sheffield Socialist Party and the TUSC Party which he was a candidate for in this year's local elections.


Jane Sharp says she's "unemployed due to disability" but according to her Facebook profile she's on a Workfare placement at Phoenix Enterprises, a not-for-profit company that aims to increase employability of people who lack useful skills. She is also a member of the Socialist Workers Party and hopes somebody punches Katie Hopkins in the face.


Stephen Porter only appears to be bothered about UKIP challenging the Labour Party in Doncaster. A bit strange as he's a member of rival left wing party, Yorkshire First. He is a member of the trade union sockpuppet, Hope not Hate and supports the EU In Campaign. He told the Mirror that he's a chef but according to his Facebook profile he's just a kitchen assistant at the Earl of Doncaster Hotel. He thinks that newspapers printing biased stories should be illegal but thinks buying pirate DVDs off his mates for a quid is fine.


Ann Bayley describes herself as a "home educator to [her] 7 children". She omitted to mention that she was also a TUSC Party candidate in the local elections. She came last.


Zak Cochrane is a member of Love Music Hate Racism, Rock Against Racism, Stand up to UKIP (described as "a leading activist") and Stand up to Racism - all trade union sponsored organisations. Love Music Hate Racism is run by a convicted criminal who was accused of raping a 14 year old girl. He's also a member of the left wing black supremacist think tank, Institute for Race Relations and a Marxist revolutionary. He goes into schools and colleges to tell children that UKIP is fascist which is, of course, illegal propaganda.


Lani Ball is a Peace & Development Studies student at Leeds Beckett, a Labour Party activist and a member of trade union sockpuppet, Hope not Hate, which is paid by the unions to attack UKIP to try and combat the party's threat to the Labour Party.


The other 11 "protesters" aren't named by the Mirror but all of those who are have strong links to political parties and trade unions. In the group shot you can see a large Unison banner behind these trade unionist political activists.

The Mirror is running a poll on the article asking if UKIP is racist. They must be disappointed that the majority of people have answered no despite the link being shared around left wing extremist groups on social media.

Saturday 26 September 2015

UKIP's first openly gay London mayoral candidate selected

Peter Whittle has been selected as UKIP's candidate for London Mayor.

Whittle is the founder of the centre-right think tank, New Culture Forum and UKIP's first openly gay London mayoral candidate. Nigel Farage said he was "delighted to learn that the party has elected him as our candidate in the battle to become London Mayor".

Pink News, the Guardian and Huffington Post have yet to mention Whittle's selection, presumably trying to work out a way of making it prove that UKIP is homophobic.


Friday 25 September 2015

Antrim TUV councillor defects to UKIP

A TUV councillor in Antrim has defected to UKIP.

Cllr Donna Anderson's defection means there are now two UKIP councillors on Mid & East Antrim Council.

The political make-up of the council is now:

PartyCouncillors
DUP16
UUP9
TUV4
Alliance3
Sinn Féin3
UKIP2
SDLP1
Independents2


We need an army of evangelists for #EUout - and the training will start here!

To ensure the UK regains its independence from the EU we need to campaign - but persuading the people we meet is not enough. We need to not only persuade them to vote for independence, by leaving the EU, but we need to persuade them to go and persuade everyone they meet to vote for independence too!

I want a list of the top six reasons for restoring (and maintaining!) UK's independence, and solid arguments to back them up. This list will be a document that every EUOuter can learn, get behind and promote.

Ideally they will not just be reasons for leaving the EU, but reasons for having an independent UK for ever. So they will live past the EU Referendum and be passed on so we never end up in this miserable state again. But any solid reason is a candidate to be used!


Please Help Create This List

Visit http://www.tricider.com/brainstorming/2orgZHu2OwF (no registration etc required)

Enter your top reason for wanting an independent UK outside the EU.
And Vote on any reasons already posted there!

Please do it NOW before you forget! http://www.tricider.com/brainstorming/2orgZHu2OwF

I will be using RadioFreeUK.org to promote this, and it will be open to anyone else to promote, use etc...

Please do it NOW before you forget! http://www.tricider.com/brainstorming/2orgZHu2OwF 


**edit**
I messed up the original voting things, so updated the link from
http://www.tricider.com/brainstorming/2WF7Zk0k0QF
to
http://www.tricider.com/brainstorming/2orgZHu2OwF

Tuesday 22 September 2015

VW Emissions - The state is always incompetent so needs to be as small as possible.

The state test cars because car makers can't be trusted. VW behaved as expected (untrustworthily), it is the state that has failed by not detecting this earlier.

Every single employee employed in the testing of vehicles should be sacked and any pay they received clawed back and given to the car owners, VW and taxpayers.


You have probably heard about the 'VW emissions scandal':


They have admitted that they programmed their cars engine management systems to run extra-clean while emissions were being tested so they were within the legally set emission limits, but that the engine management system ran less clean, but more powerfully when in use and being tested for power.

So all the blame is being put on VW... However what is it they actually did (apart from the academic offence of 'breaking the law')?

What they did is make a mockery of the US government. A government who introduced laws and expensive testing/compliance red tape, and testing regimes that completely failed to do what they said it would do... All this time, money, effort that the US government have expended on these laws and testing has been completely wasted - millions, if not billions of taxpayer dollars, down the drain for absolutely nothing... In fact, worse than nothing, for a false sense of security.

What idiots thought it was a good idea for the government to create unenforcible laws? And create a huge expensive regime to fail to enforce those laws?

The state test cars because car makers can't be trusted. VW behaved as expected (untrustworthily), it is the state that has failed by not detecting this earlier.

Every single employee employed in the testing of vehicles should be sacked and any pay they received clawed back and given to the car owners, VW and taxpayers.

[First published at http://free-english-people.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/vw-emissions-state-is-always.html]

Monday 21 September 2015

The new House of Lords - Lets hound the dead weight Lords out today!

I am no fan of the Electoral Reform Society - I think they are worse than a nasty waste of space, they actually block real reform by claiming the ground and doing nothing worthwhile with it.

They ignore the nasty, unrepresentative, unelected EU commission (because they share its progressive, social democratic headline ideals of crushing the free individual) and focus on reform of our House of Lords.

The appointed Lords is quirky but it works - modern practice is to use what works even if the reasons for it working are as yet unknown (but do, of course, research why it works). We have test driven software development, evidence based medical practices etc... we start with what works, then work out why - the House of Lords basically works.

However, while the House of Lords does basically work, it is too big. And each time it is 're-balanced' it just gets bigger. It needs a mechanism for ditching its dead weight - while I don't make a specific proposition for this mechanism of ejecting the dross, I do, here outline where the dross is to be selected from.

Here is a table showing how many votes each party got in teh 2015 election and shows how many seats they should have in the lords by strict PR.

There are some lose ends - Independents, Bishops, Cross Benchers etc. But you can see that we can start selecting hundreds for the chop immediately - simply rank them by usefulness (attendance, contribution to debate etc) and top slice the ones to keep.

If someone does that ranking and names those who should go, the public can start hounding them out of office immediately...


PartyVotes 2015Lords ActualLords PRNew Size
Total30365689774774Change400Change300Change200Change
Conservative Party1130010922328865149-74112-11174-149
Labour Party934732421123827123-8892-11962-149
UK Independence Party388109939996514838352623
Liberal Democrats241586210162-3932-6924-7716-85
Scottish National Party14544363737191914141010
Green Party1157613130291514111087
Democratic Unionist Party1842604512-22-21-3
Plaid Cymru18170425320201-1
Sinn Féin17623244222211
Ulster Unionist Party114935231201-11-1
Social Democratic & Labour Party9980933111111
Speaker3461711000000
Independent1768900000000
Bishops260-260-260-260-26
Crossbench1760-1760-1760-1760-176
Independent Liberal Democrat10-10-10-10-1
Independent Social Democrat10-10-10-10-1
Independent Ulster Unionist10-10-10-10-1
Independent Labour20-20-20-20-2
Non-affiliated200-200-200-200-20

[First published at http://free-english-people.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/the-new-house-of-lords-lets-hound-dead.html]

UKIP NI councillor Henry Reilly remains UKIP councillor despite suspension from internal party activities for 3 months

UKIP's first councillor in Northern Ireland, Henry Reilly, has been suspended from internal party activities for 3 months over a spat with the party's leader in NI, David McNarry MLA.

Reilly is an extremely popular councillor in Northern Ireland both in UKIP and the wider unionist community but he and McNarry haven't seen eye to eye for some time. The current disagreement seems to revolve around Reilly being prevented from appointing spokesmen for the NI party and the subsequent publicising of his suspension by McNarry following which Reilly accused him of bringing the party into disrepute.

As we understand it, Cllr Reilly remains a full and active member of UKIP and continues to sit as a UKIP councillor but is currently prevented from taking part in internal party matters whilst head office try to make some sense of what is happening over there.


Sunday 20 September 2015

Comrade Corbyn's rail renationalisation derailed by the EU

The new Labour leader, Comrade Corbyn, pledged to nationalise the railways "line by line" if he becomes Prime Minister.

He's also pledged to support the UK's continued membership of the EU which is unfortunate as EU Directive 2012/34/EU prevents the renationalisation of privatised railways.

Eurostat says just 1 in 5 asylum seekers are from Syria

The EU's statistics organisation, Eurostat, has released statistics for the second quarter of the year showing that just 1 in 5 asylum seekers entering the EU came from Syria.

Whilst 21% of asylum seekers coming into the EU during the second quarter of the year were from Syria, 18% were from non-EU countries in Europe (Albania, Kosovo, Ukraine and Serbia). 19% came from Iraq and Afghanistan and 9% came from Africa (Eritrea, Nigeria and Somalia). Another 4% came from Pakistan whilst 2% came from Russia. Less than half of all asylum seekers coming into the EU were from countries suffering conflict.

Statistics for this quarter probably won't be available until Christmas but should make interesting reading although how the authorities are going to count Syrians entering the EU is a bit of a mystery as the people coming over on boats throw their passports into the Mediterranean so they can't be sent back and their country of origin can't be proven.


Friday 18 September 2015

UKIP win Folkestone by-election

UKIP's Neil Jones has won a by-election for the East Folkestone ward of Folkestone Town Council.

The seat became vacant following the death of People First councillor, Paul Marsh and was won by Jones with a 7.7% majority.

CandidatePartyVotes%
Neil JonesUKIP36537.44
Dylan JeffreyLabour29029.74
Peter MonkConservatives21121.64
Bev RolfeLib Dems919.33
Seth CruseTUSC181.85

Cameron and Osborne quietly pay £1.7bn bill they refused to pay last year

The Treasury have quietly paid the £1.7bn the EU demanded last October after recalculating our membership fees from 1995 to take into account the economic output of the black market, including drug dealers and prostitutes.

When the EU hit the Treasury with the bill last year both David Cameron and George Osborne refused to pay it. Cameron described it as "completely unacceptable" and he wouldn't pay it whilst George Osborne said he would get "a better deal".

Instead, they paid half of what was being demanded in July and the other half in September after doing a deal to delay the embarrassing payment until after the election. In total, £2.87bn was paid and the EU will hand back a £1.24bn rebate at some point in the future assuming they don't decide to confiscate as punishment for not signing up to the redistribution of refugees and illegal immigrants.


Corbynites launch petition objecting to Karma

A petition on the left wing activist website, 38 Degrees, calling for the UK media to stop smearing Jeremy Corbyn has attracted over 11,000 signatures.

Left wingers appear to be unhappy that their man is on the receiving end of the same type of politically-motivated smear campaign that UKIP has been subjected to for the last few years by the very same papers that Labour and the Conservatives have been briefing against UKIP.

UKIP most popular LGBTQ* group on Facebook

The UKIP LGBT* page on Facebook now has more "likes" than the LGBT* pages of any other party, making UKIP the most "liked" LGBT* political group on Facebook.

Well done to Flo Lewis and her team for all the hard work they put in countering the propaganda put out by the media, our political opponents and militant left wing gay rights activists like Pink News who try to portray UKIP as homophobic.

UKIP had the first and only transsexual MEP (shame she turned out to be a power mad narcissist) and has the UK's first openly gay MEP.

Thursday 17 September 2015

Iraqi terrorist shot dead by police in Berlin

Police in Berlin have shot dead a convicted Iraqi terrorist who attacked a policewoman with a knife.

Rafik Mohamad Yousef was sentenced to 8 years in prison in 2008 in Germany for membership of Al Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Islam and plotting to assassinate the then Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi. He was released on bail and the German government tried to deport him but were unable to do so because of the EU Convention on Human Rights. He was instead allowed to stay in Germany and given a tagging order.

Yousef removed his tag before going out and stabbing a policewoman in the neck. He was shot four times by another police officer and died from his wounds.

Monday 14 September 2015

Germany and Czech Republic reinstating border controls

The German and Czech governments have announced that they are reinstating border controls on their borders with Austria to try and stem the tide of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers making their way across Europe.

Angela Merkel's announcement that they would take an unlimited number of "refugees" has led to tens of thousands of people from the Middle East, north Africa and even as far away as Bangladesh making their way to Germany. The mayors of Germany's major cities have told the German government that they're full and any new arrivals will probably end up sleeping in the train station or on the streets.

The German government says that it won't open its borders again until the rest of the EU agrees to a "fair redistribution" of people claiming asylum. The message that they can no longer get to Germany will take a while to filter through to their countries of origin, creating a huge bottleneck in the rest of the EU and make the problem even worse for the countries on the migration route to Germany. It might even make things so bad in south and east Europe that the rest of the EU has no choice but to take them in for humanitarian and security reasons. Worryingly the German army is planning to house 1,000 Syrians in a barracks in northern Bavaria, putting weapons within reach of any ISIS terrorists that manage to smuggle themselves in with that group. You could almost believe that this was planned all along!

A new law comes into effect in Hungary tomorrow that will see anyone illegally crossing the newly-fortified Hungarian border put into prison.

Sunday 13 September 2015

Juncker wants to give hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers the right to work in the UK

Jean Claude Juncker, the unelected president of the EU Commission, has called for changes to asylum rules to allow people claiming asylum to do so in any EU member state, not just the one they arrive in. He also wants asylum seekers to be given the right to work as soon as they make their claim and for the 160,000 asylum seekers and illegal immigrants in Italy, Hungary and Greece to be redistributed around the EU.

Juncker went on to propose that countries that don't sign up to his EU quota system for asylum seekers and illegal immigrants should have to pay more into the EU budget as punishment and setting up a £1.5bn fund to give to the African governments that these people are supposedly fleeing from for their safety.

Nigel Farage told Juncker in the EU Parliament that he had got it wrong and that we would be mad to take the risk of ISIS terrorists getting into Europe with genuine refugees. The unelected president of the EU Commission responded by telling the elected MEP that his opinion was worthless.

David Cameron's response to Juncker's proposals was to announce that there is no limit to the number of asylum seekers, illegal immigrants and terrorists that can come to the UK.

Saturday 12 September 2015

Comrade Corbyn wins Labour leadership election

Jeremy Corbyn has won the Labour Party leadership election outright with 59.5% of first preference votes.

The grammar school educated Marxist's victory has led to the resignation of eight members of the shadow cabinet within hours:
  • Rachel Reeves
  • Jamie Reed
  • Yvette Cooper
  • Chris Leslie
  • Chuka Umunna
  • Tristram Hunt
  • Emma Reynolds
  • Liz Kendall
Although the Labour Party's impending lurch to the far left is likely to stem their losses in the north of England where UKIP has replaced Labour as the party of the working class and in Scotland where the SNP have all but destroyed the Labour Party, it will almost certainly destroy the party in the midlands and the south of England.

"Fairness" and "equality" are great buzzwords to throw around but the Marxist way of achieving that is by dragging everyone down to the same level with punitive taxation, confiscation of wealth, nationalisation of industry and command economics. Marxist theory calls for the introduction of Communism complete with the abolition of private property, nationalisation of industry and state-controlled rationing of food and goods.

Corbyn might come across as an unassuming man of the people but he's a Marxist revolutionary and he'll take the shirt off your back if he thinks someone else deserves it. Nobody will prosper under Comrade Corbyn apart from the "revolutionaries" at the top.


Friday 11 September 2015

EU Court of Injustice rules that travelling time is working time

The EU Court of Justice has ruled that the time taken to travel to the first job of the day for people workers without a fixed office should be counted as working time.

The ruling means that travelling salesmen, plumbers, gas fitters, etc. who have no fixed office but travel directly to client locations from home start working from the minute they leave their home for the purposes of the Working Time Directive. It means there will be fewer hours for workers to make money unless they give up their right not to work more than 48 hours.

Once again, the EU Court of Injustice has issued a ruling that is supposed to enhance worker rights but in reality will result in more workers waiving their rights to be able to continue to do their job effectively and make enough money to pay the bills.

Labour hold Thurrock West & South Stifford safe seat

Labour have held on to their safe West Thurrock & South Stifford seat in a by-election yesterday.

The by-election was called after Terry Brookes was charged with possession of child porn. He was only elected in October last year.

PartyVotes%
Labour62943%
UKIP45031%
Conservative38426%

Wednesday 9 September 2015

Let's sort out our own problems before we start trying to sort out other peoples'

I've been challenged by a Labour supporting friend to make my views on Syria public in the hope that I'll be denounced as something unspeakable - probably a racist or a xenophobe as is the wont of those on the left - and so that when people vote for me in the next election in 2019 they will know "exactly what I stand for".

I am opposed to the EU policy of not turning back boat loads of illegal immigrants and instead helping them get to Europe. I am opposed to the reckless attitude of the Germans who seem determined to bring half of the Middle East to Europe to work in their factories without a care as to the impact on the rest of the continent. I am opposed to the selfish, politically and economically motivated propaganda campaign the media are running which is presenting an absolutely distorted view of what is happening around the Mediterranean. I am opposed to the response of the British government - and in particular, David Cameron - to the media propaganda campaign. I want the father of the boy who was found washed up on a beach in Turkey to be arrested and charged with reckless endangerment for putting his wife and children in danger unnecessarily with the consequence that they all died. I want the British government to sort out the homeless and hungry people who already live here before taking tens of thousands of people we can't afford to feed and house from another country.


A year or so ago there were relatively few boatloads of people trying to get from Africa or the Middle East to Europe. There has always been a problem with people trafficking across the Mediterranean and the activity has increased with the conflicts arising out of the Arab Spring but nothing on the scale that we're seeing now. The various coastguard services would intercept boatloads of illegal immigrants and tow them back into the waters of the country they came from, discouraging more people from making the same dangerous journey. There were a couple of incidents where overloaded boats sank and some people drowned so the EU, at the behest of the Germans far away from the problem, decided that its common approach to illegal immigration across the Mediterranean would be to send the coastguard to tow the boats to Europe or unload the boats and ferry the passengers to the mainland if they were overloaded. The people traffickers charging up to $10,000 per person to smuggle them into Europe must have thought Ramadan had come early - now they could not only promise to get their victims to Europe but they could promise them that a welcoming party would come to bring them to safety. Suddenly the trickle of refugees became a river of illegal economic migrants making their way to Europe not for safety but for economic reasons and the genuine refugees have been lost amongst them.

Germany is suffering from labour shortages and a new law making it easier for immigrants to live and work in Germany was mooted earlier in the year. Germany wants mass immigration and they don't care about the impact on the countries that are having to deal with the mass influx of people. In fact, the economic impact on the Mediterranean states actually works in Germany's favour, helping to cement German hegemony over the rest of the Europe.

The media have run a selfish and cynical propaganda campaign motivated mainly by the desire to sell more newspapers or gain extra viewers and in some cases such as the Guardian, Independent and Huffington Post, to further a political agenda. They have bombarded us with pictures of women, children and families in distress but rarely show pictures of hundreds or thousands of the young, single men who make up the majority of the people trying to get to Europe. Pictures of families in distress sell papers, pictures of thousands of young, fit men less so. Their actions have directly affected government policy by manipulating public opinion and using it to shame politicians into doing something - anything - just to be seen to be "doing something".

Forced to be seen to be "doing something" for the baying media, David Cameron has announced that the UK will take 20,000 people from Syria over the next 4 and a half years. They won't be allowed to work, they'll be provided with houses, they will get free health care and education and they will receive benefits. There are an estimated 185,000 homeless people already living in the UK, of which around 9,000 are ex-Forces and more than half are under 25. They're not a priority. Neither are people living in England with cancer who now have 23 fewer treatments available to them after the British government just announced that it is cutting funding for the English cancer fund by £100m. Coincidentally, the British government is throwing £100m at Syria in an attempt to be seen to be "doing something". Clearly the decision was made to cut the English cancer fund some time ago and isn't a direct response to Syria but if £100m can be found to be spent on who knows what in Syria, it could have been found to spend on cancer treatments in England? Like the rest of the International Aid budget, the British government has little or no idea what most of the money is going to be spent on or what the outcomes are expected to be.

Now for the boy who was found washed up on a Turkish beach, pictures of which were the straw that broke the camel's back and prompted the UK and other EU countries to throw open their borders and allow tens of thousands of mainly economic illegal immigrants to travel wherever they please. I saw the picture of the boy's body being carried up the beach and of course it made me sad. Anyone who wasn't moved by the image clearly has some emotional dysfunction. But as the story unfolded it made me angry because while the picture of the boy was used by the media to demand that the government "do something" they were less keen to tell people the circumstances behind his death. A Sky News interview with the family's relatives in Canada revealed that the boy's father had decided to come to Europe because he wanted dental implants. They could only send him the $14,000 it was going to cost to get it done in Turkey $1,000 at a time and he didn't want to wait so acting on their advice he piled his family onto an overloaded boat to try and smuggle themselves into Europe. It then transpired that rather than fleeing Syria for their safety as refugees, they'd already left Syria three years ago and had been living in Turkey. They weren't coming to Europe as refugees, they were coming as economic migrants and health tourists. On that totally unnecessary journey, the man's two sons and wife all died. He says he blames himself and so do I. He recklessly endangered his family's lives not for safety (which they already had in Turkey) but for personal and economic reasons. I want him arrested and charged with reckless endangerment and the manslaughter of his children.

Throwing money at Syria isn't going to solve anything. They don't need money, they need to stop risking their lives trying to come to Europe and they need to stop making people traffickers millionaires in the process. The Persian Gulf is full of stable, prosperous countries who have done nothing to help their neighbours in Syria or Iraq. The Gulf states are still importing tens of thousands of immigrants from India and beyond to work because they have more jobs than people but they refuse to take in their Arab neighbours. The solution is there, not in Europe where 23m people are unemployed, 4m are homeless and half of the continent is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. We can't afford to house and look after 20,000 refugees and economic migrants, nor can we afford to take the risk of freely admitting terrorists into the country posing as refugees. ISIS have bragged of smuggling 4,000 terrorists into Europe alongside refugees. It is almost certainly bravado and propaganda to claim such high numbers but if just 1% of what they claim have made it to Europe that's 40 new trained terrorists on the continent. A couple of wanted terrorists have already been found posing as refugees this year and arrested, the terrorist threat isn't just idle speculation.

We should continue to grant asylum to genuine refugees who make it to the UK legally (ie. not via a number of safe countries in defiance of international law) and to bring over some of the refugees from UN refugee camps in Syria but nothing like the numbers David Cameron has announced today. If we are to avoid the ghettoisation of the immigrant Syrian population in the UK then it needs to be on a scale that can assimilated by the communities they live in. We have a part to play in solving the problem but it's a bit part, not the main event.