Looking forward to next weekend

First up will be the regular Charlton Marshall First Thursday meetuing of the association. Updates on activities of the party and what we have been doing over in Brussels and at home.

Then on Saturday 8th there is the South Western Counties Conference for UKIP which will be taking place at Exeter University and promises to be a lot of fun.

All who can come along should try.

Black is White.

Yesterday I published, through the think tank the Bruges Group, a study into the way in which the British Government is dissembling about the costs and purposes of the EU's Galileo satellite system.

If youi are interested you can read the whole paper by clicking on the link above (pdf) or by going here.

Wind Farm update

Take a look at this, and if you live north of Gillingham just think about it. According to Danish news this is an old model, but gales happen in England too and even the faint possibility of this happening at the Bouton site must give pause for thought.

Hat tip Eursoc

The 'Chicken Run' video

This YouTube film is of the Chicken protest last week in Strasbourg. It contains impassioned oratory, and high farce - and your correspondent getting rather hot under his suit whilst remonstrating with the Parliament's Head of Security. The point is of course that while those who are pushing through the Constitution use the language of democracy, what they are doing is using the tools of technocratic totalitarianism.

New Facebook Group

A new Facebook Group has been set up.
Gawain Towler for North Dorset

Pop along there, take part and tell your friends. The UK Independence Party is here in North Dorset and has every intention of building our prescence and effectiveness. The people of the Constituency deserve nothing less.

Busy week

This week has been spent chasing around the Strasbourg Parliament, doing everything in my power to undermine the institution. To that end I was able to start the entire story of the misuse of funds by Euro-MPs,

Robert Galvin, who is head of unit, internal audit and is based in Luxembourg.

Well informed rumours are suggesting that the silence surrounding this report is well warranted. One comment from a senior official has been passed on to me, "the reason that we cannot make this report open to the public is that we want people to vote in the 2009 (european) elections".

That of course could be Chinese whispers but my scource is normally pretty accurate.

From what I can guess the activities of some Members of the European Parliament will make the Conway affair look like pretty small beer.

This story was picked in almost every media organisation in the following few days, as can be seen here and here.

Elsewhere I demonstrated in the Parliament against the Parliament's vote in favour as reported in today's Sunday Telegraph,

EU Parliament votes not to take any notice of the people's wishes

There were surreal scenes in Strasbourg last Wednesday as the European Parliament prepared to ratify the Lisbon Treaty by a huge majority. (It says something for the reverence in which we hold that parliament that not a single British national newspaper bothered to report the fact.)

Dressed in yellow chicken suits, three protestors against the refusal of EU governments to allow referendums on the treaty were chased round the corridors and up and down the staircases of the futuristic building by 15 burly security men trying to arrest them.

When Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party and one of the 50 MEPs of different parties who have been leading the pro-referendum campaign, was summoned to this fracas, he was interviewed by a television crew.

Pointing out that no officials had intervened last month when the parliament was invaded by anti-GM Greens dressed as bananas, he asked why it was only pro-democracy protestors who had to be silenced?

At the end of the interview, Anne-Margrete Wachmeister, head of the parliament's audio-visual unit, gave orders that Mr Farage' s comments must not be broadcast.

Overhearing this, Shirin Wheeler, presenter of the World Service's Record programme (and daughter of the distinguished BBC correspondent Charles Wheeler) intervened to say that, unless this order was withdrawn, the BBC would withdraw its parliamentary coverage from both Strasbourg and Brussels. The official backed down.

Meanwhile in the chamber itself the battle continued. When it was proposed that the parliament "would respect the result of the Irish referendum", the only one to be allowed on the treaty, only 129 MEPs (including one Tory, Nirj Deva) supported it, while 499 (including four Tories) voted that the wishes of the Irish people should not be respected. But what if they vote in favour of the treaty? It is good to know that our democracy is in such reliable hands.

In the picture I am the chicken on the right.

I also revealed that Tories had failed to vote in favour of a referendum, and some had even refused to support an amendment that caled for respecting the result of the Irish referendum.

Dorset lags behind in wealth

Figures released yesterday put Dorset just three percent above the EU average for income. This is a pretty poor show when you consider that countries such as Poland and Bulgaria are included in the figures.

Virtually the only other parts of the UK with worse figures are Devon and Cornwall who are below the average. We discover this at a time when Dorset's services are being cut because the Labour government believe that just because it is beautiful it must therefore be rich.

It is a disgrace that the fire service and policing are being cut in Dorset in order that resources can be transferred to other areas in the country that are significantly better off. The cuts are just prejudice from the government that wants to shore up its own support base while treating rural England and Dorset in particular with contempt.

Of course if we were not subsidising the EU to the tune of £138.6 million per day net then the county and the country would be far wealthier.