Fake news: Guardian blames Dutch woman's visa mistake on Brexit

The Guardian have blamed a Dutch woman refused a residency permit after failing to provide valid evidence of her right to be in the UK on Brexit.

Monique Hawkins - a Dutch passport holder - has lived in the UK for 24 years, is married to a UK citizen and has two children who are British citizens. She was taken in by the ludicrous scare stories put out by Project Fear (the Guardian included) and fearing for her future right to live in the UK, she applied for a residency permit so that she could then apply for citizenship.

But when she sent the forms off to the Home Office she failed to enclose her original passport as evidence that she was living in the UK legally so her application was rejected and she was told she would have to leave the country. Rather than accept that she had made a mistake and the Home Office had followed the rules absolutely correctly, she went to the Guardian who published yet another scare story warning EU citizens that they faced being deported just like Hawkins.

All she had to do was provide the Home Office with her Dutch passport to show that she has a legal right to live here but instead she provided a solicitor-certified copy which - as the solicitor should have been aware - is not acceptable. In fact, it is the first thing on the list of documents you must provide on the Home Office's website.

The Home Office have now fast-tracked her application and provided her with a residency permit but she's still not happy. She has told the Guardian that she believes it is unlawful for the Home Office to hold on to applicants' passports for up to 6 months whilst their applications are processed because it infringes on their right to freedom of movement so expect another Remoaner legal case soon trying to water down Brexit before it's even started.

The Guardian has been pontificating about fake news since it became fashionable at the end of last year but just like their crusade against tax avoiders they run from their tax dodging Cayman Islands trust-owned offices in London it is a cynical and hypocritical campaign that doesn't extend to themselves. The only link to Brexit in this story is that Hawkins decided to apply for the residence permit because of the Brexit vote. If she had decided to apply because she needed it to work the headline wouldn't be "Job application: Dutch woman who was told to leave UK now allowed to stay". If she had decided to apply because after living and raising a family here for 24 years she felt British the headline wouldn't be "British identity: Dutch woman who was told to leave UK now allowed to stay".

This is a perfect example of the fake news that is causing fear and division in this country and once again it is the Guardian and Project Fear who are behind it.

Tax dodging Guardian falsely implying Aaron Banks and Leave.EU are dodging tax

The Guardian has tried to smear Aaron Banks and the Leave.EU campaign by implying that they're involved in tax avoidance schemes.

Banks asked Gibraltar-based STM Fidecs - a company that he used to own share in - to set up the limited company behind the Leave.EU campaign. They set up the company in July and transferred it to Banks in August. Using an agent to set up a company for you is standard practice and using one that you are familiar with and trust is common sense.

Leave.EU is registered in the UK and registered to pay tax in the UK. Banks clearly chose STM Fidecs as an agent to set up the company for him because he knows and trusts them, not because of their speciality in "maximising tax efficiency for high wealth individuals"  and "structuring international groups". Leave.EU is neither a high wealth individual nor an international group and is registered in the UK so it's hard to see how the Guardian could infer any benefit for Leave.EU or Banks from having STM Fidecs set up the company.

The Guardian tried to paint Banks as a shady tax dodger last year, prompting him to publish a copy of the cheque he sent to HMRC for his £1,865,100 personal tax bill and threaten legal action.
Of course, the Guardian aren't stupid enough to actually come out with an accusation of Banks or Leave.EU being involve in tax avoidance. They've just taken the facts, embellished them with unrelated and irrelevant information and left it to the read to put 2 and 2 together and come up with 5. This is something of a speciality for the Guardian whose readership is mostly too lazy or too stupid to separate facts from propaganda.

Something else that's a speciality for the Guardian is tax avoidance. Their in-depth knowledge of how companies like Starbucks or Amazon legally avoid paying tax doesn't come from research, they have first hand experience of tax dodging themselves.

The Guardian's offices are owned by an offshore subsidiary based in the Cayman Islands, the world's most notorious tax haven. This tax dodging company owns many of Guardian Media Group's investments and is shrouded in secrecy thanks to Cayman privacy laws. Last year the Guardian sold its controlling share of Autotrader to Apax Partners for £600m. How much tax did the Guardian pay on this £600m cash windfall? Nothing. They used the Substantial Shareholding Exemption scheme to avoid paying the £126m corporation tax bill on the profits.

In 2007, the Guardian purchased Emap for £1bn but managed to find a way of avoiding paying about £120m in stamp duty on the purchase. Meanwhile, in 2009 the Guardian made a pre-tax profit of £306.4m and ended up getting a tax rebate of £800k, leaving them with a corporation tax bill of just £800k or a measly 0.26% of their profits.

The Guardian are the ultimate hypocrites on taxation, bleating about tax dodgers and calling for boycotts of companies that don't pay their "fair share" of tax whilst funnelling their profits through companies in tax havens and dodging hundreds of millions of pounds of tax. One of the tax dodges the Guardian uses is moving money to Luxembourg where it pays 0.125% corporation tax through a registered tax avoidance scheme run by PriceWaterhouseCooper instead of the 20% rate it would pay if it wasn't part of a tax avoidance scheme or paid the corporation tax in the UK. This tax dodge is only possible because of EU double taxation regulations. No wonder the tax dodging Guardian is so keen to keep us in the EU.

Thanet Green Party Councillor still on police domestic extremists databse

The Guardian has reported on Green Party councillor, Ian Driver, having a whinge about the police holding a file on him as part of a database on domestic extremists. But Driver knew in 2013 that the police were monitoring him and it's been in the public domain since the Thanet Gazette reported on it last year.

This isn't news, it's olds but seeing as how Cllr Driver is so desperate for publicity let's take a look at his record and association with extremists.

Cllr Driver has close ties to Comrade Bunny La Roche, the rent-a-mob left wing extremist with an all-consuming irrational hatred of Nigel Farage who organises the protests against UKIP in Kent and further afield. Comrade La Roche and Cllr Driver organised the violent protest against Nigel Farage during which one of Cllr Driver's prominent supporters, Andrew Scott, assaulted Farage with a placard.

The Labour leader of Thanet District Council, Cllr Clive Hart, resigned from the Local Government Association because of Cllr Driver's "futile and vexatious complaints and information requests" a year ago.

Cllr Driver had to be removed from a council meeting by the police after refusing to stop illegally filming the meeting and was behind proposals for a cannabis café in Thanet. He planned to stand for election as Police & Crime Commissioner for Kent on a platform of legalisation of drugs and prostitution but couldn't raise the £5k deposit.

Driver is a troublemaker who not only participates in violent protests with far left extremists but is actively involved in organising them. If you organise violent protests, associate with known violent extremists, get yourself into a position of authority and then seek more power you should expect the police to be interested in you.

Guardian validates UKIP's concerns over immigrant benefits

The Guardian have helpfully verified that the UK is keeping far more than our fair share of people on benefits.

Research by the Guardian has found that 29k UK nationals are claiming unemployment benefits in other EU countries but almost 69k EU immigrants are claiming unemployment benefits here. The Guardian have tried to spin the statistics to support unlimited immigration by cherry picking the facts they want readers to pay attention to and ignoring the inconvenient truths.

According to the Guardian's figures, there are 29,095 UK nationals claiming unemployment benefits in other EU member states. That's an average of 1.078 unemployment benefit claimants for each of the other 27 EU member states. At the same time, there were 64,830 EU immigrants claiming unemployment benefits in the UK. That's 6000% more unemployment benefit claimants from the EU claiming in the UK than unemployment benefit claimants from the UK claiming in the EU. There are more people from Portugal and Poland claiming unemployment benefits in the UK than there are people from the UK claiming unemployment benefits in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden combined.

Of course, unemployment benefits are just a small part of the problem. There are no statistics on people claiming child benefits and tax credits but we know that £600k a week is being paid out in child benefit to people living in other EU member states with three quarters of that going to people living in Poland. There are also no statistics on how many people who already live in the UK are claiming unemployment benefits because they can't find a job because most new jobs go to newly arrived immigrants.

Uncontrolled immigration from the EU has been bad for the economy and bad for society. There have apparently been 2m private sector jobs created in the last 4 years. A lot of those are part time jobs but it's still hundreds of thousands of full time equivalent jobs. There are 1.9m unemployed people living in the UK and there shouldn't be. Jobs are being created but most of them aren't taken by unemployed people already living here, they're being taken by newly arrived immigrants. The more people there are on benefits, the higher taxes need to be to pay for them and the less money people have to spend stimulating the economy and creating more jobs.

Yes, we all know a UKIP councillor in Kent used to be in the National Front

The Guardian must be having a few slow news days judging by their shock revelation that a UKIP councillor in Kent used to be a National Front member.

The party has made no secret of Cllr Martyn Heale having been a member of the National Front in the 70s and has explained every time a newspaper has decided to try and make something of it that he was a member of UKIP before the rules were brought in banning past and present members of the National Front and other racist or fascist organisations from joining the party. Cllr Heale was eligible to stand as a UKIP candidate despite his past membership of a proscribed organisation under rule U.5 of the party rulebook.

Cllr Heale's past was brought up during last year's election campaign and failed to damage the UKIP vote. In fact, a quick Google search turns up discussions about his past as far back as 2006 and every year since. Strangely, there is no mention of the former militant Nazi and convicted animal rights terrorist, Margaret Burke, who was elected as a Labour councillor in 2013.

Guardian in positive UKIP story shocker!

Not only have the Guardian put UKIP on their front page today, they've actually refrained from outright hostility towards the party as well. I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming.

UKIP's youth wing, Young Independence, held its national conference in Birmingham on Saturday and the Guardian was there along with other more salubrious titles. The result is a reasonable article inside the paper and a picture on the front page.

Guardian still whining about Murdoch's dinner with Farage

The Guardian isn't exactly known for its objectivity or the quality of its editorials but their latest UKIP editorial is particularly dire.

The Guardian have a bee in their bonnet about Rupert Murdoch having dinner with Nigel Farage last month. You see, while it is perfectly acceptable for the Guardian's editor to meet politicians or have secret meetings with the Met Police Commissioner, it is entirely unacceptable for Murdoch to meet anyone the Guardian disapproves of.  Or to consume oxygen.

The hacks at the Guardian disapprove of the Sun's recognition of UKIP as a serious political force and part of mainstream politics.  It doesn't matter that UKIP is consistently polling as much as double the Lib Dems, consistently beating one or two of the LibLabCon parties in every Westminster by-election and winning council by-elections; as far as the Guardian is concerned UKIP are a fringe party that should be mocked for thinking it's one of the big boys.

The effect of these headlines and stories is to bring Ukip from the fringe into the mainstream, to legitimise it as a serious political contender. The Sun is urging its readers not to see it as a marginal party that the prime minister, David Cameron, once ridiculed as full of "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists".

UKIP has brought itself from the fringe in the mainstream and legitimised itself as a serious political contender by performing so well in elections and showing that a UKIP vote can be a winning vote.  The Guardian clearly thinks that the dead tree press is more important that it is.  Getting the Sun's backing would of course be very welcome but it would happen because UKIP was already credible and electable.

On the timing of the Murdoch-Farage dinner just after UKIP beat the Tories and Labour to finish a close second behind the Lib Dems, they say:

Murdoch clearly agreed, giving a giant clue to his sympathies on Twitter with a tweet saying "Farage reflecting opinion". In other words, reflecting Murdoch's, and the Sun's, opinion.

UKIP didn't come second in Eastleigh because the party reflects Rupert Murdoch or the Sun's opinion, UKIP came second because it reflects the opinions of a huge proportion of the population.

They go on to repeat the same tired and discredited "single issue" myth about UKIP:

Ukip exists for one reason: to remove Britain from the European Union. And that has long been Murdoch's desire too.

UKIP has the largest and most comprehensive manifesto of any mainstream party.  The party was founded as an anti-EU campaign but has evolved over the years into a credible party with a mature and comprehensive set of policies.  It hasn't been just about the EU for years, it's time the Guardian caught up with reality.

The Guardian's parting shot is an ignorant fantasy:

That apart, Farage must also realise that there is another maverick contender for Murdoch's hand: Boris Johnson. If Johnson were leader, the Sun's master would surely get right behind him. Then again, perhaps Farage would do the same.

Like all formerly-eurosceptic senior Tories, Boris realised that he wasn't going to get anywhere in his party unless he abandoned his principals and started promoting our EU membership to the plebs.  So he abandoned his principals.

Is it any wonder the hypocritical, lazy, tax dodging Guardian is losing money?

Polling suggests UKIP will hold balance of power after election

UKIP is outpolling the Lib Dems by more than 2 to 1 and more importantly, would hold the balance of power if the polling turned into actual vote share in the next general election.

In Survation's latest poll for the Guardian, Labour are still out in front on a slightly diminished 39% with the Tories in second place on a record low of 27%.  UKIP are third with a projected 17% of the vote with the Lib Dems trailing in 4th place with just 8%.

It means that for the first time the only way the Tories could form a government would be with UKIP's help.  I'm not suggesting that UKIP should form an electoral pact with the Tories - I would never support such a move unless UKIP was the majority partner - but supporting a minority Tory government on a policy by policy basis would put UKIP in an extremely powerful position.

Guardian tries to smear UKIP

Tax dodging left wing rag, the Guardian, has made a pitifully lame attempt to smear UKIP.  True to its left wing roots the paper is haemorrhaging money and is only managing to keep its head above water through its capitalist off shore tax avoidance investment vehicles.

Every political party has its fringe, but not many have members whose policy priorities include death to all squirrels, the end of the NHS and a return to the gold standard.

The Labour Party candidate in Eastleigh wants Margaret Thatcher to be assassinated and wished we had lost the Falklands War.

The United Kingdom Independence party is a different case. As Nigel Farage, the party leader, enjoyed his popularity bounce following Ukip's second place at the Eastleigh byelection – flying to Canada to meet global rightwing heavyweights including the former Australian prime minister John Howard and the US Tea Party guru Ron Paul – officials were scrambling to contain the party's most extreme elements, including xenophobia and racism.

I've never met a UKIP member (or non-member for that matter) who has an irrational fear of foreigners.  I don't doubt there are racists in the party, just like there are in every other party.  The LibLabCon parties have presided over a system of institutional racism against the English for decades with medical apartheid, refusal to allow democratic representation, etc.

On one members' message board about migrants from Romania and Bulgaria, Ukip member Raymond Adams said this week: "Nothing less than ethnic cleansing is taking place. The Lib-Lab-Con EU puppets are dutifully diluting the English in particular to eradicate any nasty Nationalism. Then the next generation can be loyal and dutiful EU clones. EUtopia will have arrived!"

There seems to be a suggestion that this is incorrect but they don't explain why.

John Patrick added: "If there really are some 4 million Romanians and Bulgarians arriving within the year, I just hope our police are ready. We will have to build more prisons and increase the benefit payments."

Even if these desperately poor Romanians and Bulgarians were no less likely to commit crime than the people already living here (bear in mind that the Mafia and other serious organised crime syndicates are a real problem in both countries) then some of those 4m people will end up in prison.  As for benefits - most Romanians and Bulgarians that come here will be penniless by our standards and they will be entitled to benefits when they move here.

The remarks have been defended by the party chairman, Steve Crowther, but others have been removed. On threads where two members had reportedly linked homosexuality to paedophilia, Jonathan Arnott, the party's general secretary, complained: "I've locked a number of gay marriage/adoption/etc threads which seem to have turned to both sides using it as an excuse to have a go at each other. Some of the personal abuse – on both sides – is some of the worst we've had on this forum."

Criticism for removing unacceptable comments?

On Tuesday, Farage was the star turn at a "raucous" meeting of 100 party backers at the Ukip Patrons Club for donors giving more than £1,000. The gathering, the first since the byelection success, took place at the East India Club in St James's Square where party loyalists dined on "the roast beef of old England" washed down with claret. But beyond London clubland, senior officials have warned "wackier" elements to rein in their excesses or leave, and with party sources saying Farage has flown to Monaco, Zurich and the Channel Islands recently to meet potential backers, message control is firmly on the agenda.

"Message control" has been on the agenda for a long time.

"Its time to start falling in line," said one party official. "We have to be ready for more scrutiny and responsibility."

This is bad because?

Activist John Patrick said on a members' forum: "We must now ensure, even more, that we are squeaky clean, and remain that way, if we don't want the shell-shocked Tories to catch us out. No stings, and watch out for the secret recorders [and] cameras."

But we have nothing to fear as this hatchet job by the Guardian demonstrates ...

The party machine is to move into more professional accommodation from its cramped floor of the Conservative party's old HQ in Smith Square, Westminster, and will take space behind Claridges hotel in the same Mayfair building as Max Clifford's PR offices. Rents in the building are among the most expensive in London at more than £65 per square foot.

Still not as valuable as the Guardian's offices which of course are owned by a tax dodging offshore company based in a tax haven in the Cayman Islands.

The party declined to say who was paying for the space.

And they don't need to.

There are plenty of awkward associations in his party for Farage to negotiate from his new base. In January, the Dewsbury, West Yorkshire branch of the far-right English Defence League declared its support for Ukip and one member, John Emms, complained on Ukip's official web forum that the British National party was "subject to persecution by the Political Correction Liberal Left thugs".

A member of the EDL said he was supporting UKIP, not the other way round.  When the far left UAF and militant trade unionists declare their support for Labour the Guardian doesn't bat an eyelid.

Some of Ukip's leading lights are feted by the hard right abroad. In February, in the wake of the Sandy Hook school massacre in Connecticut in which 20 children and six adults were shot dead, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, the party's former deputy leader, appeared on a rightwing US chatshow describing post-Dunblane gun control in Britain as "kneejerk".

The post-Dunblane gun control laws were a kneejerk reaction which is why they were so badly thought out and written.  The Olympic pistol shooting team has to go abroad to practice their sport whilst of course criminals continue to trade in and use illegal pistols just like they did before everyone who legally owned a pistol was required to give theirs up.

He also maintained that the European Union was a dictatorship and described Australia's prime minister, Julia Gillard, as a communist.

The EU is a dictatorship and Julia Gillard is a communist.

Speaking about environmentalism, Monckton decried ICLEI, the international network of local government bodies dedicated to sustainable development, as "the new dictators" and "straightforward, outright in-your-face communism dressed up to appear like it is to do with the environment".

And he's wrong because?

Guardian publishes Argentinian claim to the Falklands

The Guardian has given President of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a platform to reiterate Argentina's claim to the Falkland Islands by running a full page ad consisting of an open letter to David Cameron claiming that "Argentina was forcibly stripped of the Malvinas Islands".

The letter reads as follows:

Buenos Aires, January 3rd, 2013

Mr Prime Minister David Cameron,

One hundred and eighty years ago on the same date, January 3rd, in a blatant exercise of 19th-century colonialism, Argentina was forcibly stripped of the Malvinas Islands, which are situated 14,000km (8700 miles) away from London.

The Argentines on the Islands were expelled by the Royal Navy and the United Kingdom subsequently began a population implantation process similar to that applied to other territories under colonial rule.

Since then, Britain, the colonial power, has refused to return the territories to the Argentine Republic, thus preventing it from restoring its territorial integrity.

The Question of the Malvinas Islands is also a cause embraced by Latin America and by a vast majority of peoples and governments around the world that reject colonialism.

In 1960, the United Nations proclaimed the necessity of "bringing to an end colonialism in all its forms and manifestations". In 1965, the General Assembly adopted, with no votes against (not even by the United Kingdom), a resolution considering the Malvinas Islands a colonial case and inviting the two countries to negotiate a solution to the sovereignty dispute between them.

This was followed by many other resolutions to that effect.

In the name of the Argentine people, I reiterate our invitation for us to abide by the resolutions of the United Nations.

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
President of the Argentine Republic

Cc: Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations

The history of the Falkland Islands is well documented and well known.  The islands were discovered and in 1592 by an Englishman and visited again by an English ship in 1594.  The name "Falkland" came about in 1690 when the Falkland Sound was named the Falkland Channel by an English naval officer after the Viscount Falkland who was financing their expedition.

A French privateer established the first colony in the Falklands in 1764 and named the islands Îles Malouines.  The Spanish name Las Malvinas is a translation of the French name.  A British military expedition arrived in the Falklands in 1765 and formally claimed the islands.  A permanent British colony was established in 1766.

The Spanish navy purchased the French-owned colony in 1767 and in 1770 took a military force to evict the British settlers from Port Egmont and later that same year the British navy retook the settlement.  The armed forces withdrew from Port Egmont in 1774 when it became apparent things were going to kick off in America and left a plaque reiterating British sovereignty over the islands.  British seal hunters used Port Egmont as a base for four years until the Spanish evicted them.  Spain administered the islands for another 35 years until they too had to withdraw when their South American colonies got restless.  The seal and whale hunters returned following the departure of the Spanish.

A Spanish pirate from the United Provinces of the River Plate (a territory fighting the Spanish for independence that modern-day Argentina was part of) sought refuge in the islands and later claimed them.in 1820.  A Spanish settlement consisting mainly of German settlers from Buenos Aires was established in 1829 and came to an end in 1831 when the newly-independent United States of America sent a ship to recover the American boats that the Spanish pirates in the settlement had taken.  The Argentine pirate Luis Vernet remained on the island as its administrator.

The British navy sent an expeditionary force in 1833 to put an end to Spanish and Argentine claims over the islands.  Vernet was expelled and the colony put under the administration of his British deputies.  Some of the Argentinians left in Port Louis went postal in 1833 and the other inhabitants had to be rescued by the British navy.  The first settler sent from the UK arrived in 1834 and full settlement started in 1840.  Argentina invaded the Falklands in April 1982 and surrendered in June 1982.

Fernández de Kirchner's letter is factually incorrect and the Guardian is quite probably breaking the law by allowing a foreign power to lay claim to British territory in its paper.  The Falkland Islanders have repeatedly confirmed that they wish to remain a British overseas territory.  The British government can knock this on the head once and for all by having the talks about sovereignty that Argentina wants and simply saying "no".

Farage interviewed in Grauniad

I normally wouldn't go anywhere near the Guardian because it's usually just full of hate-filled far left bile and the hypocritical ravings of millionaire class warriors but they've done the unthinkable (for a left wing rag) and interviewed Nigel Farage.

Guardian journalist, Andrew Sparrow, threw the interview questions open to their readership and surprisingly got some sane and reasonable questions.

Farage came out of the interview really well considering the hard time he was always going to get from the far left.  The only disappointing bit was when he hinted at the possibility of UKIP offering an electoral pact to the Tories if they supported an EU referendum.  We've had a cast iron guarantee from Cameron for an EU referendum and it was worthless.  UKIP is not a Tory pressure group, it's a political party and if an MP or prospective MP is genuinely eurosceptic then they should be in UKIP, not propping up the europhile Tory dictatorship.

True Finns Party level with Finnish version of LibLabCon

The True Finns Party is polling the same level of support as the Finnish equivalent of the LibLabcon, the CenSocNatCol.

This is worrying the EU and the cosy club of Finnish eurohpile parties because the True Finns are the Finnish equivalent of UKIP and, in fact, sit in the Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) group in the EU Parliament.

This is good news, we need eurosceptics in every country in Europe if we're going to be successful in slowing down the EU takeover for long enough for the UK to still exist when we're in a position to get out.

p.s. Why are the Guardian calling them "far right"?  They're a socialist party.