Watch an eviction being stopped by asserting Common Law rights.

Shire Reeve gets evicted from Laois. http://youtu.be/PpUjl4LvQM8 Watch out Banks here come the People Please forward this link ... make it viral! www.BlankOfIreland.com/ This message was sent to anneabba@aol.com from: The Common Law Society | 12 Parnell Street | Waterford, Waterford County 0000, Ireland Update Email Address: http://app.icontact.com/icp/mmail-mprofile.pl?r=42498741&l=8591&s=KJ8X&m=278287&c=844845 

.

.

On the 20 February 2012 the deputy Sheriff arrived at another Irish family’s home to repossess it and give the keys to the bank in Co Laois. Thus putting another Irish family onto the streets.
People from
http://DefendOurHomesLeague.ie
http://ItsNotOurDebt.com
http://FreedomFromAllDebt.com
http://UnitedLeftAlliance.org
http://AntiEvictionTaskForce.com
and everyone else that was there.
Ben Gilroy from “Freedom From All Debt.com” questions the sheriff outside the gates to the house and does an interview at the end of the video.
Who is Ben Gilroy? (http://freedomfromalldebt.com/about-us/)
We would like to applaud both the Sheriff and the An Garda Síochána for there civil manner and understanding of the Constitutional challenges being put forward.

This video is released under the
I hereby release this video under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Please do not edited the content but feel free to Redistribute.
Download, Show at public meetings etc. (You get the idea)
For photo’s please see http://freedomfromalldebt.com/sheriff

Please like and leave comments.
Thanks

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By Simon Heffer

Last updated at 10:42 AM on 22nd February 2012

Throughout the tenure of the last Labour government this newspaper, and others — while praising the huge contribution immigrants had made to this country in the past — attacked the laxity of what were supposed to be our border controls.

It was clear the very nature of our society was being changed by a new kind of uncontrolled mass immigration — and without the British people ever having been asked whether they supported the policy.

Uncontrolled: Immigration surged under Labour

Labour arrogantly accused its critics of racism — though most of the incomers were white — and of scaremongering.

It claimed it had no choice but to open our borders to the nationals of ten mainly ex-Soviet bloc countries which joined the EU in 2004.

The truth was that — as other EU countries which restricted immigration from these states proved — it did have a choice.

Action: Home Secretary Theresa May has announced that the UK Border Agency will be split

Useless

The cynicism did not end there. Such, Labour claimed, was its commitment to ensuring that only people with a right to be in Britain could come here that in 2008 it set up the UK Border Agency. The truth, unfortunately, was very different.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has announced that the agency is being wound up next month precisely because it is useless, and the officials who ran it — rather like the borders they supposedly policed — were out of control.

Despite the strong threat from international terrorism, the evidence of eastern European criminal gangs infiltrating Britain, and our overburdened public and social services, 500,000 unchecked people were let in to Britain via Eurostar between 2007 and last year, while countless so-called students were just nodded through.

Though Labour clearly left the system in a shambles, it should be noted that it has taken almost two years for this Government to admit the mess our immigration procedures are in, and to do something about it.

So Mrs May’s department — and notably the Immigration Minister Damian Green — also have a case to answer.

They seemed unaware that their officials, too, were ordering the relaxation of controls. Yet while the Coalition has  been derelict, Labour was downright malign.

The game was given away in 2009 by Andrew Neather, a former Labour Home Office and Downing Street adviser, who revealed that mass immigration was a deliberate policy by the Left to change the social fabric of the country and to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’.

This appalling policy was never discussed publicly because Labour strategists feared it would upset the party’s traditional white working-class support. For self-interested political reasons, the public could not possibly be consulted.

Mass immigration gratified the Left in two ways that have inflicted enormous damage on our country. It furthered the bogus notion of multiculturalism — undermining national identity and common values, and preventing the successful integration of immigrant communities into the British cultural mainstream.

Moreover, at a time of growing economic crisis, it added an enormous number of people to Labour’s client state.

Recent immigrants were grateful for their admission to the country, and for the costly safety net of the welfare state that was provided for them: a gratitude that, Labour hoped, would help it garner more votes at elections.

That aside, it is generally accepted that new arrivals to a country — who are often relatively impoverished — are more likely to vote for Leftish governments.

So although present ministers have much explaining to do, this cocktail of ideology and blatant gerrymandering is of the Left’s making.

In the interests of creating a society with which Leftist ideologues felt comfortable, and which would help shore up Labour’s vote at elections, the wishes of the vast majority of the British people, and their security, were ridden roughshod over.

The idea of multiculturalism was advanced with varying degrees of stealth over several decades by politicians, civil servants and council officials. Its doctrine was spread  in schools and in teacher-training colleges.

Self-hate: Former BBC Director General Greg Dyke slammed Britain’s ‘hideously white’ mainstream culture

Weak as it so often is, the Church of England appeared to welcome it, even though it posed a mortal threat to that institution. The BBC, never to be found wanting when political correctness was required, suppressed any debate about mass immigration, took the tenets of multiculturalism as its gospel and preached it to the nation.

Internationalism is one of the core principles of the Left. It abhors the nation state, which it sees as a foundry of bigotry, racism and aggressive nationalism.

The Left has always understood this: that if you manage to wreck a national culture and a national identity, you shatter the ties of history and nationhood forged over centuries.

Although there used to be patriotic Leftists — and there still are one or two — many in the New Labour project in the Nineties and Noughties were, effectively, self-hating Britons.

They tortured themselves with post-imperial guilt, wanted the country to lose its independence and be ruled by Brussels, and sought to have what a BBC executive called the ‘hideously white’ mainstream culture diluted by ‘diversity’. 

Threat

This was immensely dangerous. In a world where even Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality Commission, highlights the threat that multiculturalism poses to social cohesion, it is surprising it has taken ministers so long to become alert to this danger.

However one of them, at last, has. Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, has said that  the culture of the majority will once more be given pre-eminence in society.

This is utterly sensible and, indeed, indispensable if we wish for a coherent and settled society of shared values.

Social cohesion: Trevor Phillips

Shared values: Eric Pickles

To promote — as opposed to tolerate — the practices of other cultures is to drive people into ghettos. It prevents integration and assimilation and causes strife in society between religious and social groups who find themselves gazing at one another suspiciously across the social divides created by multiculturalism.

Mr Pickles has specified what this assault on multiculturalism will mean. He has said that public bodies’ obsession with translating leaflets into all known languages — and spending a fortune in public money on doing so — should end.

Learning English is one of the fundamentals of grasping the British way of life.

He has argued that tolerance of the beliefs of others should not extend to disowning those of the majority.

He deplored the disciplining of Christian workers who wear crucifixes, and the recent decision to ban prayers before the meetings of a town council in Devon. He has called all these issues ‘the politics of division’, and he is right.

Ludicrous

In a society that remains more than 90 per cent indigenously British, it is ludicrous to be ashamed of national traditions, rooted in common values from a shared past.

And it is entirely right to expect those who come here to accept those values and traditions, and not be made — usually by mischievous, politically-motivated white liberals — to feel hostile towards them.

When even many atheists recognise the central importance of Christianity to the culture and institutions of our country — and I am one of them — it is offensive to the intellect as well as to the spiritual to seek to downgrade or marginalise that faith.

Our society needs an end to mass immigration.

This is not just because the parts of the country where immigrants most wish to settle are overcrowded, and the public services and infrastructure are cracking under the strain, or because we have 2.7??million unemployed.

It is principally because our national identity — founded on Christian values of tolerance and decency, and on a history of which we can be exceptionally proud — has been gravely injured by Britain’s Left-wing enemy within, and needs to recover from its wounds.

The best way to guarantee a harmonious future for all our people, of whatever racial background, is to make that culture strong again, and for us all to embrace it.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2104550/Mass-immigration-Labour-tried-destroy-Britishness.html#ixzz1n73GxvKd

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By Stuart Littlewood

20 February 2012

Stuart Littlewood argues that behind British Foreign Secretary William Hague’s extraordinary and otherwise inexplicable hostility towards Iran may lie the desire to preserve the imbalance of power in the Middle East so that Israel remains the dominant military force.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, British Foreign Secretary William Hague claims that Iran is threatening to spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East which could be more dangerous than the original East-West Cold War.

William Hague’s double talk

“It is a crisis coming down the tracks,” he says. “Because they are clearly continuing their nuclear weapons programme… If they obtain nuclear weapons capability, then I think other nations across the Middle East will want to develop nuclear weapons.

“And so, the most serious round of nuclear proliferation since nuclear weapons were invented would have begun with all the destabilizing effects in the Middle East.

“We are very clear to all concerned that we are not advocating military action,” he assures us. “We support a twin-track strategy of sanctions and pressure and negotiations on the other hand. We are not favouring the idea of anybody attacking Iran at the moment.”

But, says Mr Hague, “all options must remain on the table”.

David Cameron’s double standards

That same day Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Sarkozy signed a “landmark agreement” committing their two countries to a shared programme of civil nuclear power and setting out a shared long term vision of safe, secure, sustainable and affordable energy.

“We are working together … to stop a nuclear weapon in the hands of Iran,” said Cameron, adding:

As two great civil nuclear nations, we will combine our expertise to strengthen industrial partnership, improve nuclear safety and create jobs at home. The deals signed today will create more than 1,500 jobs in the UK but they are just the beginning. My goal is clear. I want the vast majority of the content of our new nuclear plants to be constructed, manufactured and engineered by British companies. And we will choose the partners and technologies to maximise the economic benefits to the UK.

Such freedom of action or benefits must not be enjoyed by Iran, of course.

Some three weeks earlier Mr Hague was clamouring for an “unprecedented” package of measures including an oil embargo and financial sanctions “to increase the peaceful, legitimate pressure on the Iranian government”. It’s tempting to add “as punishment for their peaceful and (so far) legitimate civil nuclear activities”. Such measures are no doubt intended to bring ruin and terror in a way that bombing couldn’t.

Most of us remember only too well how the Iraq sanctions devastated that country’s economy and resulted in widespread hunger and disease among Iraqi people. As John Pilger reported in the Guardian on 4 March 2000:

This is a war against the children of Iraq on two fronts: bombing, which in the last year cost the British taxpayer GBP 60 million. And the most ruthless embargo in modern history. According to UNICEF, the United Nations children’s fund, the death rate of children under five is more than 4,000 a month – that is 4,000 more than would have died before sanctions. That is half a million children dead in eight years. If this statistic is difficult to grasp, consider, on the day you read this, up to 200 Iraqi children may die needlessly.

With this evil still quite fresh in people’s minds Hague successfully obtained his “unprecedented” measures, meaning worse than those taken against Iraq presumably, to inflict on Iranian women and children.

“A mad dog too dangerous to bother”?

There are a number of issues raised by Hague’s extraordinary antics.

Why does he say the Iranians “are clearly continuing their nuclear weapons programme” when there’s no proof?

Why does he say “Iran is threatening to spark a nuclear arms race” when Israel has already destabilized the region with its nuclear arsenal?

And even if Iran really does have a weapons programme his claim that the present situation is “the most serious round of nuclear proliferation since nuclear weapons were invented” is rubbish. The BBC reported recently that back in 2009 the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) expressed concern about Israel’s nuclear capabilities and called on it to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), open its nuclear facilities to inspection and place them under comprehensive IAEA safeguards. “Israel refuses to join the NPT or allow inspections. It is reckoned to have up to 400 warheads but refuses to confirm or deny this.”

Actually, Israel is the third or fourth largest nuclear force in the world and the only one in the Middle East. But our brave politicians dare not even whisper this fact let alone criticize it. According to a 2006/07 report by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, most unofficial estimates put Israel’s nuclear arsenal in the hundreds, possibly larger than the British stockpile. “Israel… has an unsafeguarded plutonium production reactor and reprocessing capability and possibly some uranium enrichment capability, along with various other uranium-processing facilities.”

It is the only state in the region that is not a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (Iran is). It has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. As regards biological and chemical weapons, Israel has not signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. It has signed but not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Israel just doesn’t care. Who can forget that much-quoted remark by the former Israeli defence minister, General Moshe Dayan: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother”?

And is anyone surprised at reports that European cities are targeted?

Against this background it is difficult to understand how Hague’s aggressive escalation against Iran is in the British national interest – or anyone’s interest except Israel’s. Do the British people want it? If Mr Hague’s purpose is to help preserve the imbalance of power in the Middle East so that a rogue regime, Israel, remains the dominant military force, he must be called on to explain the wisdom of it.

Hague and Cameron both voted enthusiastically for the Iraq war, and we know the consequence in lives and irreversible damage to the country, its heritage, its social fabric and infrastructure and its survivors – and of course to Britain’s reputation. We want no repetition, surely.

William Hague, according to the Jewish Chronicle, told David Cameron when he became Conservative Party leader in 2005 that a deep understanding of the Middle East would be crucial if he wished to be taken seriously as a statesman… “because you can’t understand it without the history. That’s been one of the failings sometimes with the Western governments.”

The pair’s support for Israel and its Zionist ambitions is such that no sane world would allow them anywhere near the levers of international power. Besides, Hague seems to have jettisoned his history. In March 1951 the Iranian Majlis and Senate voted to nationalize Anglo-Iranian Oil, in which the British government had a majority interest and which had controlled Iran’s oil industry since 1913 under terms that were disadvantageous to Iran. Dr Mohammad Mossadeq, the newly elected prime minister, carried out his government’s wish to cancel Anglo-Iranian’s oil concession, which was not due to expire for another 42 years, and take over its assets.

In a speech in June 1951 (M. Fateh, Panjah Sal-e Naft-e Iran, p. 525) he explained:

The Iranian state prefers to take over the production of petroleum itself. The company should do nothing else but return its property to the rightful owners. The nationalization law provides that 25 per cent of the net profits on oil be set aside to meet all the legitimate claims of the company for compensation…

“It has been asserted abroad that Iran intends to expel the foreign oil experts from the country and then shut down oil installations. Not only is this allegation absurd; it is utter invention…

Considering Britain paid Iran only 16 per cent of the profits during the inter-war years and treated Iranian oil workers abominably, while profiting hugely itself, these were generous terms.

History repeats itself

Faced with nationalization the British government went mad and imposed a blockade and vicious sanctions, quickly bringing Iran to its knees. Mossadeq, popular and highly regarded, was removed in a coup by MI5 and the CIA, imprisoned for three years then put under house arrest until his death. The Iranians were condemned to suffer the reimposition of the hated Shah and his secret police for another 25 years. The Islamist revolution of 1979 was the inevitable consequence.

And Iran has not forgotten.

Perhaps Mr Hague, before pressing the “History Repeat” button too many times, should pause to reflect and answer just ten questions:

1. Have we so easily forgotten the cruel and devastating effect of economic sanctions on civil society, especially children?

2. Would the foreign secretary kindly explain the reasons for his hostility towards Iran?

3. What concrete proof is there of Iran’s military application of nuclear technology?

4. Why is he not more concerned about Israel’s nuclear arsenal, the threat it poses to the region and beyond, and the mental attitude of the Israeli regime?

5. Why is he not seeking sanctions against Israel for its refusal to sign up to the NPT or engage constructively on the issue of its nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction?

6. How many times has a British foreign secretary visited Tehran in the 32 years since the Islamic Revolution?

7. Did Mr Hague make an effort to go and talk before embarking on his punitive sanctions programme?

8. Britain’s conduct towards the Iranians in 1951-53 when a previous Conservative government, in cahoots with the USA, snuffed out Iran’s democracy and reinstated a cruel dictatorship, was largely responsible for bringing about the Islamic Revolution and setting the pattern of future relationships. Is it not shameful that this Conservative government is spoiling for another fight? Shouldn’t the Foreign Office focus on exerting influence through trade and cooperation?

9. Iran’s present administration, like others, may not be to our liking but nor was Dr Mossadeq’s democracy 60 years ago. Similarly, the Israel-leaning administrations of the US and Britain are not much to the liking of the rest of the world. In any event, what threat is Iran to Britain? And why is Mr Hague leading the charge?

10. By pulling our people out of Tehran and kicking Iran’s people out of London Mr Hague has shut the door on diplomacy. How can he now communicate effectively with a nation he seems determined to goad into becoming an implacable enemy?

On this last point I hear that Baroness Ashton, the European Union’s ‘foreign minister’, is handling contact with Iran on behalf of the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany. So much for Hague’s talk of negotiations alongside sanctions. While playing the role of chief bully he has shut himself out of any direct conversation. As for Ashton, she hasn’t made the slightest impact on the crisis in Palestine, even with the clout of 500 million citizens behind her, so is anyone holding their breath?

Most of those questions were put to Mr Hague through my MP (who happens to be one of Hague’s junior ministers) two-and-a-half months ago and repeated early January, but Mr Hague isn’t replying.

Until he does, the foreign secretary ought to be made to stand in the parliamentary “naughty corner”.

http://www.redress.cc/global/slittlewood20120221

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It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so. Robert A. Heinlein, science-fiction author (1907-1988)

Fifty Million at Risk

by Patrick Worms on Feb 9, 2012 • 9: 28 UTC 1 Comment

In the Dogon country of Mali, something astonishing is happening. In a dozen villages northeast of Koro, facing the hot Sahara desert, food is in plentiful supply, despite the drought affecting the region. Dogon farmers reaped a bumper crop a year ago, ensuring their villages would have enough food to carry them through the dry season.

Elsewhere in the Sahel, a catastrophe is brewing. Across the swathe of arid lands between the Atlantic and the Red Sea, malnutrition is raging. Famine has already hit every nation from Mali and Burkina Faso in the west to Sudan and Kenya in the east.

I found out about this completely underreported bit of news while spending time with the global institute tasked with the management and improvement of trees used in tropical farming – for food, fuel, fodder, and more. At Nairobi’s World Agroforestry Centre, over 500 scientists devote their careers to improve our understanding of the role of trees in farming.

I have learnt that it is not primarily the drought affecting these lands that is to blame. They have always been arid, and their farmers have traditionally coped with these conditions. Something far more serious, and far more scary, is afoot: the soil is dying.

Exhausted of organic matter, baked hard by the relentless sun, the soils of the Sahel are barely able to support crops any longer. When rain does come, it washes off the hard, concrete-like surface in flash floods, barely moistening the soil underneath. Yields are dropping, even in years of good rain.

For centuries, African dryland farmers dealt with their harsh environment by fallowing, letting land lie idle for up to 15 years to benefit from the organic matter generated by natural vegetation.  But population growth means that there is no spare land any more. Fallow periods have dropped to two years or less, with the land being cropped every year in a desperate attempt to grow enough food for all. That option is exhausted. Animal manure, a time-honoured way of boosting the fertility of crop lands, has become scarce, too: there is simply not enough grazing land left.

And right as these traditional fertility methods are failing, the oil-dependent price of chemical fertilisers is soaring. With global oil demand growing rapidly, this is unlikely to change. A serious catastrophe is in the making.

Research carried out by renowned agroecologist Roland Bunch and published in this year’s “state of the planet” report shows that across an area of drylands that hosts 150 million rural farmers, yields are dropping by 10 to 15% every year as soils are dying. A perfect storm of adversity is beginning to impact some of the poorest people on the planet.

There are grounds to fear the worst: Bunch fears that 50 million people could be at risk of starvation by 2015. If he is right, desperate millions will flood the slums of Africa’s cities and the smugglers’ routes to Europe. As more rural poor crowd the cities, the price for their largely unskilled labor will drop just as food prices continue to surge thanks to collapsing agricultural productivity. Starvation will begin stalking the slums, too. A deadly cycle of famine and political instability will take root.

He may well be right, sadly. I found plenty of people at the agroforestry centre willing to question details of his analysis. But they all agree with his central tenet: the decline in soil fertility across Africa’s drylands is evident, driven by population and climate change, and deeply worrying.

But the Dogon country shows it need not be so. The Dogon farmers near Koro are living in the same drylands as their neighbours. They, too, have to deal with scarce rains. And, like them, they have no money to buy fertilisers. Yet their fields yield many times more food than their neighbours’. Their malnutrition rates are much lower. What is going on?

What the Dogons are doing is a traditional form of multi-story agriculture, or agriculture with trees. The native species they use fertilise the soil as their small leaves drop – unusually, at the start of the rainy season, just when crop seedlings need all the help they can get. Their burrowing roots bring up precious nutrients and water from many meters down, nourishing the land and helping it keep some moisture even during droughts. And when it comes time to harvest, farmers leave the residues on the soil, protecting it from wind and sun.

Their soft and loamy soils are a sharp constraint to the surrounding plains of rock-hard ground. These absorb twice as much water when the rains come. And the trees provide fodder for livestock, fuel for cooking fires, timber for construction, and nuts and medicinal bark for sale. While their neighbours are at constant risk of starvation, for these Dogon farmers, that threat is remote.

This kind of agriculture, known as evergreen cultivation because the soil is never left bare, has been pioneered across Africa’s drylands by the World Agroforestry Centre. It has proven itself elsewhere. In Malawi, where it has been applied by over 200,000 farmers, yields have risen dramatically, and the soil is healing. The districts where it is used, recipients of food aid a few years ago, have now become net food exporters.

The government now intends to roll evergreen agriculture out across the country. Ethiopia has announced a massive programme to plant 100 million fertiliser trees. Tanzania, Rwanda and others have adopted national agroforestry strategies, too. In parts of Kenya, the land is beginning to look like that of the Dogon, more like a forest than like traditional farmland. And here in Zimbabwe, where I am writing these words, the demand for this technology is far outstripping the supply of fertiliser tree seeds.

It takes very little to set up this kind of agriculture: tree seeds and a bit of planting. There is no need to buy unaffordable inputs. Often, all it takes for evergreen methods to spread is for farmers to see their neighbours benefiting from their use. In Niger, Zambia, Burkina Faso, Tanzania and elsewhere, pockets of evergreen agriculture are spreading, protecting their farmers from famine.

Evergreen agriculture can double or triple crop yields. The best farmers get yields of up to 7 tons – almost as much as the American Midwest’s average of about 10 tons. The trees capture atmospheric carbon; help farmers better cope with droughts and heavy rains; and do it all while reversing decades of soil degradation. Growing food this way is the future – because it works.

But Africa’s drylands are vast. Different tree and crop combinations are needed to meet given local conditions. Transport is nonexistent or very expensive, and there are few radios and fewer TVs. Most farmers don’t know that there is a practical solution to reverse the slow death of their soils, and have no access to the necessary tree seeds.

And it takes time for trees to grow – time that we are rapidly running out of. The dramatic drop in soil fertility that Bunch has documented has already led tens of millions of people to the edge of starvation. One more drought, even a moderate one, will push them over that edge.

The catastrophe can be avoided, but there is no time to lose. Evergreen agriculture must be rolled out as rapidly as possible, across all of Africa’s drylands.

Such a programme need not be expensive. Growing the necessary seeds can be good business, as Malawi’s tree seed producers attest. Sometimes, it is enough to fund a vehicle whose job it is to carry farmers to a nearby evergreen farm. Evergreen advisors can help establish the first farms in a new area, selecting appropriate seeds and helping the village agree bylaws to protect young seedlings from animals. That seed of incentive will, experience shows, help convince the neighbours.

Evergreen agriculture will spread. The expertise to carry out evergreen across the continent is already available. It must be deployed, and now. It is the only proven, sustainable method to avoid a looming catastrophe of almost unimaginable scale.

Photograph courtesy of SOS Sahel UK. Published under a Creative Commons license.

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• Henry Porter
• The Observer, Sunday 15 January 2012
• Article history

Four of the earliest surviving copies of the Magna Carta on display at the Bodleian library, Oxford. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

First, the UK Bill of Rights Commission: has anyone seen it? Are we quite sure it exists in corporeal form? Do we know where its members meet? How come people are forming the impression that the UK Bill of Rights Commission is doing rather less for the public good than a home counties bridge party?

These questions haunt me because Kenneth Clarke, the secretary of state for justice, the man who set up the commission last spring to investigate a new bill of rights – no doubt with half an eye on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta in 2015 – is also responsible for the justice and security green paper, which threatens to deprive us of one of the vital traditions of common law, guaranteed by Magna Carta. You could dignify this with the word irony, but it is just the usual story of politics and hypocrisy. While pacifying those who worry about liberty with a footling commission, composed largely of lawyers from left and right, who cancel each other out, Clarke proposes a vast extension of secrecy in the civil courts and inquests, which will suppress evidence of corruption and negligence in high places, as well as reduce access to justice and the public’s right to know.

Sometimes, I wonder if Clarke, who is a QC, read the paper before it was published last autumn, because it is arguably more menacing to our legal traditions than anything dreamed up by his predecessor, Jack Straw. But he must have read it. Indeed, the high commands of the major parties have all read and apparently support the proposals that, in the case of the Liberal Democrats, amount to a historic betrayal of the principles of open justice.

Apart from the Tory MP David Davis, there is barely a whisper of opposition to the shoddy, self-serving and manifestly illiberal measures, which Clarke claims will improve executive accountability and provide “a court system equipped to deal with sensitive material and intelligence services that are able to get on with their job”.

There you have the lies summarised. Now let’s look at what the proposals will actually mean.

The most important point is that Clarke will provide a magic cloak of protection for any minister or government agency that wishes to cover up a wrong, most significantly for members of the intelligence services. Under his law, evidence that British officials were involved in the rendition and torture of British resident Binyam Mohammed could have been suppressed. Evidence that emerged last autumn that British spies arranged the rendition of two Libyan opposition figures to Gaddafi’s people for torture may not, if Clarke gets his way, be heard in an open British court, because the minister will be able to declare the material “sensitive” or “against the public interest”.

Those are vague concepts. Anything can be thus defined: the death of someone in police custody, the contamination resulting from a nuclear accident, the details of a government contract, or security lapses in a government laboratory, to say little of the matter of gentlemen with Muslim names being conveyed to some fetid, bloodstained cellar. Executive accountability will be reduced, not improved.

Once Clarke’s apparatus is in place, it is likely to encourage a sense of immunity in officials, possibly the idea that they are above the law. The result will be a worse-run country, where the state grows incrementally more heedless and irresponsible – exactly the argument I made against, among other things, Jack Straw’s proposal for secret inquests.

Over the last six years, I have stressed the dangers of the tendency of illiberal practices to spread through the system, after being introduced to deal with one discrete issue. Following controversy over the deportation of terror suspects, Labour established the Special Immigration Appeals Commission and introduced the “closed material procedure”, which allowed evidence to be withheld from the individual and his legal team. Instead, it was revealed to a special advocate who supposedly protected the individual’s interests, yet wasn’t allowed any contact with him or his lawyers.

This shameful arrangement spread quickly. In numerous other contexts, the state used the “sensitive” label to make sure that evidence was not disclosed to the other party. Clarke’s innovations will mean that closed material procedures and special advocates will become much more common in civil courts and inquests, denying the public knowledge of the misbehaviour and mistakes of officials – the people we pay for with our taxes. Our servants! It is retrograde and condescending in the extreme, but, worse still, it breaks the promise in Magna Carta, which says: “To no man will we sell, delay or deny justice.”

Dinah Rose QC summarised the obvious advantage to ministers in her Atkin Memorial lecture last year. The legislation would, she said, “permit courts to try common law claims for damages using a closed material procedure, whenever a government minister, who is, of course, likely to be party to the action, decides that disclosure of particular material would be damaging to national security”.

We are following America, where the state secrets privilege results in the exclusion of evidence from the proceedings simply on the basis of affidavits delivered to a court by the government, and this is going to make life very difficult for serious journalism in Britain. A response to the green paper from Guardian News and Media, owners of this newspaper, says Clarke’s proposal would have a serious impact on the judicial process, court reporting and public interest journalism. Closed hearings, secret evidence and secret pleadings and judgments will result in the indefinite removal of information from the public domain.

The green paper is designed almost shamelessly to prevent information concerning such things as British involvement in Binyam Mohammed’s torture reaching us. That motive tells you all you need to know about the rottenness of the proposal and why we should follow the example of the many special advocates who have voiced their opposition.

Clarke’s fall-back position will probably be to guarantee the intelligence services immunity from scrutiny in open court, but given the absolute lack of opposition in Parliament he may get everything he wants, in which case we will all be worse off.

Which brings me to the UK Bill of Rights Commission and my conviction that if we are to have a new bill of rights, it is the public who must wrest this process from the lawyers, academics and former civil servants, working away to boost the credentials of politicians at the next election. Just as capitalism needs reform, so do the mechanisms that guarantee freedom, scrutiny and accountability. The English gave Magna Carta to the world 800 years ago; now we need to update it properly.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/15/henry-porter-ken-clarke-bill-of-rights

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Quite bizarre, as global warming has changed into climate change now (I thought)…

Now that the alternative media has uncovered the Global Geoengineering programs that have been underway for over a decade, the corporate controlled media has been forced to admit and deal with this classified and top-secret program.

It is becoming more clear by the month that as classified programs are discovered and information about them reaches the masses, the corporate media, which is engaged in a cover-up or is self-censoring this news, has had to come forward and address these operations.

The risk of being discredited is one of their prime concerns – intelligent people would say they’re too late – the corporate medias credibility has self-destructed.

http://theintelhub.com/2012/02/20/geoengineering-program-promoted-by-corporate-media/

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• Geoengineering could boost crop production, says study (grist.org)
• Geoengineered Food? Climate Fix Could Boost Crop Yields, But With Risks : The Salt : NPR (jansurvivalgear.wordpress.com)
• Geoengineering and Conflicts of Interest? (legalplanet.wordpress.com)
• International consortium of NGOs calls for coordinated action on geoengineering research (3eintelligence.wordpress.com)
• Effects of sea spray geoengineering on global climate (physorg.com)
• Dr Strangelove & Reagan’s Doctor Evil Backed Risky Geoengineering Scheme, For Real (geteconow.com)
• Geoengineered Food? Climate Fix Could Boost Crop Yields, But With Risks (junkscience.com)

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• [White Rabbit NEWSLETTER Dated December 3rd AD 2011 ] (inquiringminds.cc)
• No Oath = No Jurisdiction! Period! – It’s pantomime time – here comes the judge – no he dosen’t – Oh yes he does – Oh no he effinwell doesn’t! – Fwd: [White Rabbit Present(s) - The Shift hits the Fan - Newsletter 16th JAN 2012] (inquiringminds.cc)
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@ The Grove Centre

Sydenham, London,SE26

www.thegrovecentre.org.uk

*all classes will include*

*Lots of delicious raw food tasters throughout

*Nutritional advice

*Recipe Folder, inc. notes and all info.

*Raw Foods & Books to purchase

   *Relaxed, fun, informative, and potentially, life transforming..!

Next Class

*Raw & Living Foods – The Next Stage*

This class will be perfect for those who have attended my introductory classes and who would like to go further with regards to raw and living food preparation, or for anyone generally wishing to learn more about raw and living foods.

Included in this class will be:

*Juicing & the amazing benefits of grass juices, milks &  milkshakes, super salads and dressings, curry with ‘rice’, raw truffle making…and much more!*

Saturday 14th April, 2012

 12 until 4pm

*£40*

(Concessions £35)

If you would love to take part, or for further information then please contact me to secure your place *

Cathy Green Dip.Health.N

cathymgreen@gmail.com

You can also book online through my website

www.livingpassions.co.uk

Related articles

• 100% Raw Food Diets May Not Be The Best For You. (blissreturned.wordpress.com)
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