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MPs calls for UK Bill of Rights

Monday, August 11th, 2008 | Author: Chris Brown

MP’s calling for us, the British people, to be ‘given rights’ should make us very suspicious, very suspicious indeed.

For a start no Briton needs to be ‘protected’ by some sort of new ‘UK Human Rights Law’. Each and every one of us already have all the human rights we will ever need. They are already enshrined in our ‘Common Law’, in ‘Magna Carta’, and in the ‘Bill of Rights’. In essence the British way is for everything to be permitted, unless proscribed by Law.

We certainly don’t want to go down the continental path of everything being denied unless allowed by ‘Law’. And make no mistake about it, this is the path that these, oh so concerned MP’s want to take us down.

One really does have to wonder whether these MP’s have ever read or even understood the very real and inalienable Constitution of Britain? For to utter such nonsense these self appointed ‘champions of the people’ are either ignorant or treacherous, and quite possibly both!

MPs calls for UK Bill of Rights
Sunday, 10 Aug 2008

The UK needs a Bill of Human Rights to protect its citizens, a group of MPs has said.

The joint committee on human rights argues the government should introduce a Bill that goes beyond the Human Rights Act and would “give lasting effect to the values which are considered fundamental by the people of the United Kingdom”.

The committee suggests the Bill should include traditional rights including that of a trial by jury and the right not to be subjected to intrusive surveillance without safeguards but also more recently recognised rights such as equality.

Andrew Dismore MP, chair of the committee said: “We want to see a Bill of Rights that would set the bar for the universal standards to which everyone is entitled, and fills the gaps in the protection of more vulnerable people such as the elderly, children or people with learning disabilities.

“It should not be some sort of ‘charter for correct behaviour’ that would see rights as a reward for fulfilling social responsibilities - rather it should be aspirational, setting out a shared vision for the future of our society.”

The committee also said that there is a strong case for including the right to a healthy and sustainable environment in the Bill and detailed rights for children and other vulnerable groups.

It should be binding on private persons or bodies performing a public function, as was originally intended by the Human Rights Act, which would enable many vulnerable people to rely on their human rights against their service provider, even if they are private, the group added.

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Future of UK’s energy supply is dark indeed

Sunday, August 10th, 2008 | Author: Chris Brown

Yet another warning of the looming energy crisis (this time from the Sunday Telegraph) that we are all going to have to cope with. And all because of the inertia of the Westminster politicians - who have been too busy selling our birthright to either notice or care.

On this issue, as on most others, the only Party that is awake to the problem is the BNP. Why? Because it cares, really cares:

About both Britain and the British - its Land and its People

Future of UK’s energy supply is dark indeed

By Christopher Booker

With every week that goes by it becomes clearer that, within a few years, Britain will face an unprecedented crisis, thanks to the shambles the Government has made of our energy policy.

After years of dereliction, when only a crash programme of measures could keep our lights on and our economy functioning, our policy has become so skewed by blinkered environmentalism and diktats from the EU that we are fast heading for the worst of all worlds - a near-total dependence on foreign sources of energy which will not only be astronomically expensive but which can in no way be guaranteed to supply all the electricity we need.

What are the hard facts?
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Between now and 2015 we shall lose 40 per cent of the generating capacity we currently require to meet maximum demand (still rising), due to the phasing out of almost all our obsolescent nuclear reactors and the closure of nine of our major coal- and oil-fired power stations under an EU “anti-pollution” directive.

Gordon Brown talks about building a new generation of nuclear power plants, for which we would have to rely on the French - having two years ago sold off Westinghouse, the only British-owned firm capable of constructing them.

But even if the French play ball, which seems less likely since the collapse of Brown’s plan to sell off British Energy to France’s EDF, the new plants could still not be built in time to plug the gap.

The only short-term remedy will be to build yet more gas-fired stations, at a time when we are fast running out of our own gas supplies and when gas prices are shooting through the roof, reducing us to dependence on countries such as Mr Putin’s Russia or Qatar, both of which have recently announced caps on future exports.

Our best bet might seem to invest urgently in a dozen more coal-fired power stations, which still supply more than a third of our electricity.

But own coal industry is so run down - though we still have more than 100 years of reserves - that barely a quarter of the 62 million tons of coal we used last year was British.The rest had to be imported, including 22 million tons from Russia and 12 million tons from South Africa.

At a time when rocketing world demand for coal has already doubled prices in a year, we should again be dependent on unreliable foreign sources, to generate electricity by means which excite almost as much fury from environmentalists as nuclear power - as we saw with last week’s demonstrations against plans by German-owned E.On to build a new “clean coal” station at Kingsnorth in Kent.

With this colossal crisis fast approaching, our ministers are still lost in the cloudcuckooland of Mr Brown’s £100 billion “green energy” plan, to meet our EU target of generating a third of our electricity from renewables by 2020.

Not an energy expert in the country says this is remotely feasible. Our present 2,000 wind turbines supply just 1.5 per cent of our power, and even if Mr Brown’s 7,000 additional turbines could in practice be built, we would still be more than 200 per cent short of our EU target.

Worse still is the fact that our electricity investment market is now so skewed by the various subsidy and “carbon savings” schemes adopted to meet our various EU targets that these are now uselessly soaking up more than £5 billion a year which should otherwise be urgently invested in proper generating capacity.

Our major power companies can now make so much money from “renewables” subsidies and other “planet saving” schemes that they have much less incentive to risk capital on those which might keep our lights on.

Our energy policy is now so constrained and distorted by EU requirements that, even if we had a government with the knowhow and will to sort out the mess, we should soon be breaking EU laws all over the place.

Tragically, no one seems to remain in more blissful ignorance of all these harsh realities than our Conservative opposition which, when the crisis arrives, may well be in power.

Not only will those at the top of the Tory party, on present showing, have no idea why the lights are going out, but they will have even less idea of what to do about it - because by then it will be too late.

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