The CEP’s Mike Knowles has had an article published in The House Magazine, a House of Commons publication for MPs and politicos.

Read it here.

Technorati Tags: Campaign for an English Parliament

HM Revenue & Customs have lost two CDs containing personal data of every family with children under 16.

There is some confusion over what data has actually gone missing and the circumstances around its loss.

Firstly, the CDs have been lost in transit between a HMRC building and the National Audit Office.  They may have been lost internally (ie. sat on someone’s desk, dropped behind a cupboard, dropped in a bin, etc.) or externally by the courier TNT which operates the internal mail system.  HMRC says there is no evidence that the CDs have been stolen or aren’t still on government property.

Secondly, the data on the discs is encrypted and password protected.

Thirdly, only bank details of people who have their child benefit paid directly into the bank are on the CDs (it could be worse)

Alistair Darling has, naturally, been given a battering by the Conswervatives and the Illiberal Dumbasscrats and so he should because he’s a tit.  However, Vince Cable clearly doesn’t have very good researchers because he said “the ancient museum pieces it is currently using for computing must be replaced.”  If he had bothered to do some basic research such as Googling for information about their IT contract he’d have known that HMRC’s workstations and servers have all been upgraded recently.

Paul Gray, HMRC’s Chairman, has resigned because of the incident.

This is a monumental cock-up – my details will be on one of those CDs – but knee-jerk reactions won’t help.  As far as government departments go, HMRC is pretty low down the league table of ballsing things up – especially when you consider the mind-numbing size of the organisation.  That said, if Darling’s scalp is offered on a plate I’ll be more than happy to see it taken.

Technorati Tags: HMRC

Heather Mills is mad as a fucking hatter.  She turned up in a 4×4 to the unveiling of some new posters bearing her picture to tell us meat eating heathens that we’re all contributing to global warming by drinking milk and eating beef.

“Meat and dairy animals produce more greenhouse gases than all the worlds transport combined” says one of the posters.  The other one says that “livestock are destroying the earth”.

Humans are omnivores, we are designed to eat a mixture of meat and plants.  Eating just plants is not a healthy diet.  In one of her random, barely coherent rants, she seems to suggest drinking rats milk as an alternative to cows milk.  The woman is a lunatic.

Technorati Tags: Heather Mills, Environmentalists, Lunatics

English farmers, already on the ropes following a Foot and Mouth outbreak and a bluetongue outbreak in quick succession, are going to have to pay for DEFRA’s response to the outbreaks.

Setting aside the fact that this is DEFRA’s job, the Foot and Mouth outbreak originated in a British government research facility – why should English farmers pay the British government to clear up their own mess?

The levy which DEFRA intends to force English farmers to pay should raise about £40m.  This co-incides with the announcement yesterday that the British government is planning to cut DEFRA’s budget by £300m.

DEFRA is already a hopelessly inefficient and incompetent agency, cutting £300m off their budget is a fatal blow for the English farming industry which unfortunately relies on DEFRA for support and funding.  The budget cuts will leave DEFRA under-financed and under-resourced and even less capable of dealing with a serious incident in future.

Still, there aren’t many farms in London are there?

Technorati Tags: DEFRA, Farmers

On Wednesday November 14th the the House of Commons Justice Committee of MPs taking evidence from invited experts on constitutional matters was informed by Professor Robert Hazell, the Director of the Constitution Committee, that ‘the closest to a complete answer to the West Lothian Question was a separate English Parliament’.’ It was a statement with immense political significance. moment. The Constitutional Unit, located within University College London, had been set up with Professor Hazell as its Director in 2000 with full government backing to address the complex constitutional issues arising out of the 1998 Devolution legislation which had set up the Scottish Parliament and he Welsh Assembly but which had granted no devolution to the English nation whatsoever.

The so-called West Lothian Question has become the most difficult issue of all caused by that legislation. The Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly have created a totally unfair and undemocratic situation for the English. Scottish MPs in the Union Parliament in Westminster are still entitled to vote on such very important matters as health, education and transport for England, even to be cabinet ministers of health, education and transport for England, while no English MPs can do the same on the same issues for Scotland. It has enabled Scotland to vote for free prescriptions for all Scottish people, free personal care for the elderly, no university fees for Scottish students and free bus travel throughout Scotland for all its pensioners. The Scots each get £1500 more spent on their health and education than people in England. Nothing has created more disunity in the United Kingdom and friction between England and Scotland than the West Lothian Question since the Act of Union of 1707, three hundred years ago.

When the Constitution Unit was set up in the year 2000 its Director Professor Hazell, in his ‘State of the Union’ lecture at its inauguration stated that an English Parliament was not the way to resolve the West Lothian Question. He declared that an English Parliament would mean the end of the United Kingdom. Now, after seven years of investigation, his influential Unit has informed the House of Commons that an English Parliament physically separate from the United Kingdom Parliament is the best way to resolve the very question that is creating tension and break-up within the Union. It is a political conversion of Road-to-Damascus proportions, and all the more significant and reliable for that reason.

Technorati Tags: CEP, Press Release

A couple of months back I got an email from Gareth asking if I’d do an interview on behalf of Anthem 4 England for BBC Radio 4.

Being a media whore helpful person I invited the presenter up to Telford to do the interview.  He was here for about an hour which was distilled into less than 10 seconds in the programme!  Not only that but he said that I run the Anthem4England website which, of course, is incorrect – Gareth runs it.

Ah well, at least it got the subject of an English anthem a mention on national radio.

You can listen again to the programme.  It was on today’s Questions Questions and the anthems programme starts at about 7:30.

Technorati Tags: Anthems, England, BBC