EU Parliament researching new anti-UKIP smear?

Interesting. Why would the EU Imperial Parliament be searching for "UKIP far right" in Google and then again for "Nikki Sinclaire"? Expect a smear any day now ...

The Brussels accounts scandal must be stopped -by Marta Andreassen

We have a right to know where the EU's millions end up.Here we go again. Today, for the 14th year in a row, the European Court of Auditors will unveil their report, telling us that they refuse to clear the EU accounts. What's worse, no one will really seem to care. We are told that the accounts won't be cleared until 2020 - if then.

Having worked inside the Brussels nomenklatura and having being sacked for my insistence that financial controls have to be strengthened, I am not surprised to find that nothing has changed other than the arguments deployed to defend this state of affairs. What the auditors have been saying for years is that most of the payments made by the Commission from its £70 billion-a- year budget cannot be deemed legal or regular. That is, that they cannot confirm those payments have been made to the correct person for the correct purpose and for the correct amount. It stretches credulity to insist, as the Europhiles do, that this does not mean that there is fraud.

Because the payments are made to beneficiaries in the member countries it's easy enough for the institutions to put the blame on those recipients. Which is what they do, claiming that the problem is one of insufficient attention being paid to the paperwork. But who designed the paperwork that no one understands or completes? And who doesn't insist on it being completed? The institutions themselves, of course. Because this control is missing there is no way to protect against fraud or even to uncover it.We might not expect the European Union to be whiter than white, but we should at least hold them to the standard of being competent. Who is to blame for this situation? The Members of the European Parliament. For those 14 years they've been allowing this situation to continue.

It's not just that too many have gone native, dreaming of their part in constructing that shimmering vision of “Europe”. It's that they've forgotten what a Parliament is for, which is not simply to pass legislation, but to hold those who implement it to account. Only a complete cynic would note that those who do complain, those who do insist that this situation must change, start to find their own activities, their own expense accounts, say, subjected to audits of much greater detailed scrutiny than are applied to the accounts as a whole.

The Euro-elections in June 2009 offer the public a chance to elect those who will defend their interests, who will insist on controlling where their money is going. The EU costs Britons £40 million a day and we all deserve that so much of what is ours is not wasted in fraud.

Marta Andreassen was the chief accountant for the European Commission but was sacked for exposing the corruption of the EU. She is standing for the UK Independence Party in the SE Region for the 2009 Euro elections.

Could you survive on a 48 hour week ?

In June, the UK agreed with other EU members that Britain could remain outside the directive in exchange for boosting temporary workers' rights. But the continued opt-out must be endorsed by the European Parliament, and its employment committee is now considering ending it in three years' time !! Labour MEPs have defied the Government by backing moves to end the UK's opt-out from the Working Time Directive, which aims to limit the working week to 48 hours. The employment and social affairs committee of the European Parliament voted to scrap the opt-out today 05/11/08, a decision which goes directly against the position of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Labour MEPs were among the 35 who voted in favour, with 13 against ending the opt-out.

The issue will now be debated by the European Parliament next month.A final decision will be taken at a summit of leaders of the 27 member states, at which Britain will not have a veto!! (no say)

Business groups criticised the vote, arguing that workers should be given the option of whether to work longer hours, or overtime.Alistair Tebbit, head of EU and employment policy at the Institute of Directors, said: "MEPs have made a big mistake by voting in favour for abolition of the opt-out from a maximum 48 hour week. As the EU enters recession, employers need more flexibility, not less.

"If the opt-out goes it would become much harder for businesses to adjust the working hours of employees to meet changes in trading conditions. These new restrictions would impact on business performance and ultimately destroy jobs. This is the last thing the economy needs as businesses try to cope with the downturn.
"We urge the Government to fight for retention of the opt-out with every ounce of effort it can muster." (Hardly we cant veto it )

An estimated 1.7million regularly work more than 48 hours - with the tourism and catering industries, farmers, medical researchers and offshore workers likely to be worst affected if a cap is imposed by Brussels.

The opt-out should be retained "because workers want it" . Could you survive on a 48 hour week ? the new law could cost thousands of people the chance to do overtime or there every day job. Regardless of whether you agree with this new legislation or not, How did we get to the position of allowing some unelected, unemployable politician decide on just how much a worker can earn?.This just go's to show how much Britain has lost control and is no longer able to govern herself , we must leave the EU immediently.

The Pestilential EU By Jeffrey Titford MEP UK Independence Party – Eastern Counties

The hot topic right now is the EU’s proposals for an update to directive 91/414/EEC, which is well on its way through the European Parliament and involves the introduction of a new hazard based system for approving pesticides to replace the tried and tested existing regime, which is based on risk. I have written about it at length several times in these columns in the past year, so I won’t repeat all the arguments.

This misguided legislation typifies the EU’s approach to law making – fix it, even if it isn’t broken. What it means for farmers is the loss of many of the chemical tools they have used for years to tackle some of the most pernicious weeds and blights. It is good to see that the farming industry is belatedly waking up to the extreme threat this legislation poses to the arable sector1.

Efforts to resist these proposals are being aimed at the European Parliament’s Environment Committee. Farmers are being encouraged to lobby the Committee by writing letters to the individual members and a petition is underway, which a number of correspondents have urged me to sign. Unfortunately, much of this effort misses the central point and is wrongly targeted. Decisions on what system to use for the assessment of pesticides we use in this country should be decided by our own Government at Westminster , not by unelected officials in the European Commission. The Environment Committee is only enacting the wishes of the Commission and its proposals will be rubber-stamped by the tame European Parliament.

People seem to be forgetting that what we joined in 1973 was sold to us as a ‘Common Market’ where we would do lots of business, which would be good for the economy. Who would have believed that 35 years later, officials at the European Commission, with no democratic legitimacy whatsoever, would be laying down the law on what chemicals we may spray on fields in Britain, while our own elected Government can do nothing but stand meekly by waiting to be told what it must enforce.

If you really do want to write letters, far better to send them to Gordon Brown and Hilary Benn, urgently requesting that Britain should veto these proposals and withdraw from the Common Agricultural Policy and, ultimately, from the EU itself. The one would inevitably lead to the other. You might copy your letters to Agriculture Commissoner Mariann Fischer Boel for good measure. Only by taking these dramatic but necessary steps will we ever again get sensible agricultural policy in Britain .¨

Credit Crunch Bites Farmers
Much has been made of food price inflation at the retail end, in recent months, but it is not being passed on down the chain. Price inflation is almost non-existent at farm level and farmers are now up against a triple whammy; including a dramatic fall in the price of feed wheat, down to about £90 a tonne, half of what it was last year, major increases in the cost of fuel and fertiliser and, just to put the tin hat on it, bank credit has dried up because of the current world financial crisis. Many farmers are facing disaster.

It has been instructive, if somewhat infuriating, to see how ineffectual the EU has been in the face of the credit crisis. While the Americans have swiftly recognised that regulations known as ‘Basel 2’ introduced in 2004, in the wake of the Enron disaster, have been a major factor in the current crisis and moved to change them immediately, all the EU has done is hold a series of ineffectual meetings after which a number of heads of state and government went home and did their own thing anyway. The Basel 2 rules were introduced in two EU directives and the process of drafting a new one to deal with the problem could take a year or more.

For those wishing to understand the Basel 2 rules, they involved the introduction of a complicated risk assessment model, which is used to assess the solvency of a bank after the end of a day’s trading. It produces an asset statement to determine whether or not the institution is solvent. All this is fine and dandy when the markets are rising but in times of recession, such as now, a bank’s assets appear minimal and no allowance is made for future recovery or the underlying value of the assets. This situation renders them unable to lend or borrow money, starving the banks of the only way they can stay solvent.

Without these inflexible rules, most of the banks that have collapsed might well have survived. While the bankers are taking most of the blame for the world crisis, the European Commission and some of our politicians should take their share. The really worrying thing is that the financial sector produces a third of Britain ’s income but it is now largely controlled by the rigid and paralysed EU, which makes us horribly vulnerable to the present financial crisis and certainly doesn’t make things any easier for farmers.