Inside the House of Treason
NOVEMBER 2010: This is a more detailed review of what I have been up to over the past week, including my visit to the House of Treason.THURSDAY - Legal conference and a meeting in the House of Commons
Several weeks ago I was surprised to receive an invitation to attend a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group down in Westminster. I promptly registered to go and sat back to see if it would go ahead or whether it would turn into another Buckingham Palace-style last minute withdrawal and publicity-fest.
By the start of this week it was clear that the story wasn't going to surface in the media and that the invitation still stood, so I arranged to kill two birds with one stone. On the way down I met the lawyers to discuss further the fast-nearing end of two legal cases that have unavoidably (and deliberately, from those who wish us harm) swallowed large amounts of money and energy over the last year or so.
The main one, of course, is the tail end of the Equality Commission's attack on us. The good news that bears reiterating is that, having forced CEHR to admit in open court that their injunction was "not clear and unambiguous", it is incapable of being enforced - hence all their bullying hysteria about imprisoning us or seizing our assets for 'contempt' has collapsed in ruins.
Phillips and Woolley - plus the Tory Europhile slug Ken Clarke, who as Lord Chancellor signed the papers allowing them to go for us - clearly thought that they could steam-roller us out of the way. Well, they were wrong. We're still fighting and, at the final hearing (now probably taking place early next month) our legal big guns will be aiming to blow CEHR out of the water in costs terms.
So thanks to everyone whose generosity and loyal support has brought us to this point, and I look forward to seeing another great demo outside the Royal Courts of Justice on the day.
The second case that has been rumbling on but is now coming towards its close was the one we were forced to bring when Sadie Graham and her little clique of allies refused to undertake not to use our membership list. In order to protect our members we applied for and were granted a High Court injunction.
Unfortunately we will never get our money back because the key defendants are already bankrupt or penniless so there is no point pursuing them, but the fact that Graham's husband did indeed later leak her copy of the list gives us the grounds to apply to discontinue the now irrelevant action with the other side having to pay their own costs. Hopefully one more hearing will allow us to close the whole affair and leave us free to spend our time and money on more constructive matters.
INSIDE THE HOUSE OF TREASON
So from the solicitors on to the House of Commons. Or, to be precise, to Portcullis House (above right), the large modern annex to Parliament opened in 2001 to provide offices for 210 MPs and their staff, and Committee Rooms for public hearings.
Portcullis House was designed by architects Michael Hopkins & Partners. It's a fine building (praise indeed from a hardcore traditionalist like me!). Aluminium bronze is used for all the exposed metal in roof. The stonework is all Cornish granite, with the tall chimneys recalling the Victorian Gothic of the Houses of Parliament as well as providing natural convection air conditioning.
Inside, it's supposed to look and feel like a ship, but despite the metal 'sails' and composite wooden beams overhead I must admit I wouldn't have worked that out if I hadn't looked it up. Still, the combination of ultra-modern metal and plate glass with bow windows and light oak paneling does work really well.
It needs to mind, because the total cost rose from £165 million when it was commissioned in 1992 to a final total of £235 million, including £150,000 for fig trees. The Legg Report into the over-spend was completed in 2000 but has never been published.
The most disgraceful sign of a political elite being self-obsessed and short-sighted, however, is that the design life is a mere 120 years. Compare that with the nearby Guildhall, which was old when Charles I was tried and condemned to death. Or look a mile or so east to where William the Bastard's castle keep still forms the heart of the Tower of London.
In every case it was the peasants whose sweat paid for and built what was demanded by the Masters for their security and grandeur, but at least in the old days they really got our money's worth.
Pre-warned to allow up to 40 minutes to clear security, this in fact was almost immediate, with it taking only a couple of minutes to get out of the early evening London drizzle and up the stairs into the Boothroyd Room where the meeting was to take place.
I was immediately collared by a couple of chaps from a bio-fuels consultancy company who were eager to explain to me the benefits of ultra-fast growing nut trees which can be grown in marginal semi-desert conditions and, it is said, help to transform the local micro-climate and restore stability and fertility to soils that have been exhausted and eroded.
SEWAGE INTO FORESTS?
The meeting was entitled "The Missing Link in the Carbon Debate". Despite its title, however, the presentations within it had very little to do with the pernicious fiction of man-made global warming. Rather, it is about a set of proposals to export sewage and waste water from the UK and take it in (otherwise empty) homeward-bound Middle Eastern oil tankers to use to irrigate and fertilise reforestation projects in coastal deserts.
The carbon bit is simply the fact that growing trees use and lock up atmospheric carbon, in so doing can create biomass for power plants, food for livestock and humans, and an improved environment.
Even if one agrees with the huge number of genuine scientists who reject the AGW theory/fantasy, such proposals have many merits in their own right. AGW may be nonsense, but the problems of looming shortages in energy, food and cultivatable land are all too real, and any measures that can help address such genuine challenges are worth exploring.
The sewage export scheme is the brainchild of Greg Peachey, founder of the FREdome Visionary Trust, and a curious assortment of slightly eccentric idealists from Watford. Tonight he has also involved Pano Kroko, the Greek Chairman of the Environmental Parliament, who greets me warmly and thanks me for coming on the basis that "issues such as this have to transcend party politics."
The meeting is chaired by Katy Clark, Labour MP for North Ayrshire and Arran, a trade union solicitor. While having the never-done-a-real-day's-work profile typical of the mdoern Labour left, she did at least have the integrity to vote against ID cards.
It's opened by speakers from a group of articulate, well-programmed middle-class teenagers from Hertfordshire, who are followed by Mr. Peachy who explains the proposed project (the executive summary can be seen at HYPERLINK "http://bit.ly.cchandout" http://bit.ly.cchandout). In the course of his talk he mentions the value to us all of creating sustainable local employment that reduces the pressure for people to move from poor countries to the West, and of providing energy sources to help replace the world's fast-shrinking easily exploited oil reserves. Spendid!
Also present are several real scientists who each give a short presentation. Eric Achterberg, professor of Ocean Biogeochemistry from the University of Southampton; Frank Chambers, Professor of Physical Geography and Climate History, Univ of Gloucestershire, and Stephen Nortcliff, Professor of Soil Science at the Uni of Reading, all comment on the proposals.
Profs Chambers and Nortcliff both sympathise, but throw huge spanners in the works by pointing out that, far from being waste that we'd be well shot of, Britain's sewage is badly needed, properly digested and treated, to provide fertiliser and organic matter to improve soil structure on Britain's farms.
This really is a pleasant surprise. Ideas that used to be confined to pre-war practical visionaries such as Henry Williamson (author of Tarka the Otter, but get his Story of a Norfolk Farm if you want an inspiring read) and Right Book Club authors like Viscount Lymington are now mainstream. Both Professors effectively put the case for a long-term, nationalist response to the problems of soil degradation and the coming Age of Scarcity.
An environmental consultant tells us that he used to work for Thames Water and that they seriously examined the possibility of tankering macerated sewage to the Middle East in the 1990s, but that the first Gulf War led them to conclude that building a new generation of sewage treatment plants at home was a better bet than relying on unstable Third World regimes and potentially finding ourselves with a fleet of ships all sewaged up with nowhere to go.
I speak to one of the practical academic speakers afterwards and as well as being on the ball on soil fertility and national self-sufficiency, he also agrees that global warming has become a religious cult, replacing science with irrational pseudo-faith. Not for the first time I get the impression that we live in a time when patience with the Establishment Emperor's new clothes tale is running out.
An Irish carbon trading advisor wants his photo taken with me and bitterly criticises the crooks and incompetents who have sold his country down the river to the EU and allowed the banks to destroy its economy and hence sovereignty. To have someone who trades in carbon indulgences criticising the banks as sharks is a bit rich, but he's a charming chap with a wry sense of humour so I'll let him off.
I tell Greg Peachey that, while I'm very much on the side of the nationalist Professors, I do like his idea of promoting reforestation in the Third World, and that if there's anything a lone MEP can do to help him put it into practice I'll gladly help. He seems genuinely pleased that I've come (certainly, apart from Katy Clark, I think I'm the only elected politician who bothered to atend).
So, all in all, my first visit to the Mother of Parliaments went well. No hysteria; no security breaches; no falling sky. Another small step on the long road to BNP normalisation.
Home by half midnight. Main meal for the day a chicken and leek pie in a half-timbered pub in Beaconsfeld (just off the M40 and well worth the brief detour rather than enduring over-priced service station junk) which also serves a fine pint of Adnams Broadside.
OF TREES AND PIGS
Friday and Saturday are a mixture of office work and family time in lieu of a weekend proper. As I've already tweeted I transplant a birch sapling that was growing in a path at my parents' to its new home in our back field. Clean up the beams in our newly ceilinged and plastered sitting room (after 20 years of bare floorboards above us, it's finally neat and tidy).
And, best of all, take delivery of two weaner piglets. They're the smallest of a late outdoor litter and are too small to be porkers yet, but won't fatten up on the high, cold and very wet field where they've been living. So now they'll spend a couple of months mainly inside in our old sty, hopefully growing plump and tasty on barley, crushed peas and stored windfall apples.
They're Gloucester Old Spots crossed Large White, so are pretty hardy, but as soon as fed in their new home they buried themselves in the deep clean straw in the old dog kennel inside the sty and were soon snoring contentedly.
SUNDAY - ELECTION SYSTEM SEMINAR
The pigs are still fast asleep when I leave home at half seven on Sunday morning. Early start in order to be in Dagenham by noon for a joint election training seminar for key activists from Eastern, Southern and London regions.
I give an opening talk on the current state of the party, explaining the position with the CEHR case, the steps being taken to deal with our debt and make the cuts needed to balance our books again, the move of the Administration centre from Belfast to Cumbria, and a brief outline of key constitutional improvements that will be put forward at the Annual Conference.
Then Chris Barnet and I explain different aspects of Alfred, our online campaign and voter identification and targeting data system. In recent years the Labour Party have spent more than £7 million on their version of this technology, which has what has turned them into masters at identifying and turning out their core vote.
While we're not spending a fraction of that, we have supported many months of work by our small technical team on Alfred. By the end of the event, I think everyone there understood why, and just how closely it all ties in with our very successful experiment with public petitioning in the Bring Our Boys Home campaign.
There's a huge amount more to do, but at least we've made a start in the long-overdue development of our community campaigning and vote-winning system.
Away from there by four and on the road to the Channel Tunnel and thence to our place in Brussels. Very good fish and chips in the Seafarer chippy on the edge of Folkestone (one junction on from the Chunnel and far, far better than anything you'll ever get in the trap for unwary tourists our side of it).
Andrew Brons is already at the house when we arrive and we sit and talk over a beer about his excellent meeting with Yorkshire fishermen earlier in the week.
MONDAY - THE ROAD TO STRASBOURG
Up bright and early for the drive on to Strasbourg. The session starts at 5 p.m. and we expect to be in late to try to get speaking time in the fisheries debate so as to be able to speak on behalf on fishermen at the end of their tethers in what is all too near to being another dying industry.
En route take calls, text all sorts of people about all sorts of things, and write this. Thanks to modern technology time that would have been virtually dead travelling by car is now as productive as sitting in an office. Just as well, because there's always so much to do.
Finally, by way of illustration of things being done, I'm involved in a project to try to ensure that we nationalists keep our existing cyberspace lead over our opponents by maximising the potential of Google TV (in simple terms, the merging of Internet and TV technology in your living room).
Part of the 'edge' that we must exploit is our massive potential network of local and roving reporters, armed with mobile phones with photo and video capabilities. To show what can be done by amateurs to provide 'hard news' that the old-fashioned and cumbersome news networks just can't get (because they only have a handful of camera crews), here's footage of a dramatic lorry fire we passed halfway between Brussels and Strasbourg. Raw, fresh and could never be shown on mainstream news TV, because by the time they got a TV crew there the flames would have been out for hours.
Now imagine similar footage taken when young Muslim gangs are burning cars in Paris or Copenhagem. Or of their brethren hitting on grooming targets outside schools in Blackburn or Rotherham. Or of tons of dead fish being discarded into the North Sea thanks to the wickedly wasteful rules of the EU Common Fisheries Policy.
A thousand and one stories that the controlled media would never see the light of day or sanitise until pointless. And the day is coming when we, and people like us, can put them on the widescreen TVs of everyone in the world who wants the truth.
View the footage here.
