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Influential Tory lawmaker Andrea Leadsom spoke with SPIEGEL ONLINE about the UK conservatives' demands.


John Dolva

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''Influential Tory lawmaker Andrea Leadsom spoke with SPIEGEL ONLINE about the UK conservatives' demands.''

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/british-conservatives-on-eu-road-trip-to-tout-reform-a-944770.html

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  • 3 weeks later...

John, I have been intending to respond to your Postal Service JFK Debate thread, but there never seems to be enough time for anything for me lately. Hopefully, I can get in there before the JFK Forum goes kerplunk. At any rate, you may remember my post about Lady Jean Campbell, Norman Mailer and their "work researchin" JFK's assassination, lol; at any rate when I was looking at an obit on the Guardian Co., UK.....

I came across the following comments, circa 2007, which looked at the very least politically incorrect, in this era when Eric Snowden is in the Nobel laureate circle and the mostly Republican politicians in Washington, want to hang him from the rafters for basically doing the same thing Ellsberg did with the Pentagon Papers back in the day, I thought it segue'd rather well with what you posted here, or maybe not. Back when Saunders wrote the book on the Congress for Cultural Freedom...there was a passage someone was quoted as saying "It is fear that brings us all here."

Somewhere Santayana is turning over in his grave, but then so are all the other corpses...

here ya go

The truth Migration Watch doesn't want you to know
Jasper Gerard
* The Observer, Saturday 22 September 2007
* Jump to comments (10)
Should my children be sent 'home'? I only ask because Migration Watch and commentator Stephen Glover declare 25 per cent of babies born in Britain have at least one foreign-born parent. And, I fear, they are not raising this to salute the colourful pageantry of modern life.
My wife, Diana, was born in Istanbul. Presumably these august institutions do not consider my children - Emilia, six, Freddie, three - entirely welcome.
'OK, they might look white, but what if they are darkies underneath?' seems to be the message. 'Good God, Binky, dagos are polluting British bloodlines.'
Or perhaps as my children march across the garden singing 'The Grand Old Duke of York', they would receive middle-class waivers?
Either way, I feel like punching someone. I loathe the hypocrisy in the call for an 'honest debate' - because one as cultivated as Glover knows where that leads: to an honest brick through an Asian window.
Yes, the Home Office has been dishonest in turning a blind eye to illegal immigration, believing cheap labour boosts GDP. And yes, its Liam Byrne was either cretinous or disingenuous to attack Lib Dem Nick Clegg's idea of an earned amnesty for illegals when he knows his department presides over a system of unearned amnesty simply by its incompetence. But if the rheumy-eyed right is to launch an 'honest debate', shouldn't it at least consider the possibility that immigration makes Britain a more civilised, interesting and prosperous place?
Thankfully, the public is more open-minded. Huge numbers, inspired by the show Who Do You Think You Are?, are tracing family trees and discovering they are not quite as Anglo-Saxon as they assumed.
Or take the Rotary Club, which has now gone into partnership with Naomi Campbell. It was associated, not with stick-thin black supermodels, but with cigar-chomping corpulent bores who felt the country went to the dogs with the Windrush. Yet Campbell has achieved the impossible and made it sound almost interesting; if even the Rotary Club gets it, why don't Glover and Migration Watch?
Here's a snapshot of how immigration has changed our village.
A school dad from Zambia who is captain of the village football team spoke to primary kids about Africa and had children spellbound. The dignity of a woman whose Iraqi father was killed in a bombing raid on Baghdad had villagers in tears at a service in our church.
A woman from Pakistan organises charity projects. And Diana, too, throws herself into village life. Oh, and many families employ Eastern European au pairs, gardeners and builders.
Clearly in the Isle of Dogs, there are stronger grounds to howl. Immigration worries poor whites (and blacks). In Cambridgeshire, immigrants are blamed for a crime explosion. But in this 'honest debate', shouldn't we ask why we need imported labour?
Surely it's because we have several million derelict natives who can't or won't work. Immigrants are a symptom of a problem - the problem of our underclass. Oh, and global forces producing massive population shifts beyond the powers of government.
Unless Glover and Migration Watch really are neo-Nazis obsessed with blood lines - and I don't wish to believe that of them - then their concern must be with the behaviour of immigrants rather than the banal point that they hail from elsewhere.
But that is an argument for integration. In highlighting difference and seeking separation, the old right simply rehearses the discredited multiculturalist shibboleths of the 1970s left.
By all means, try to kick out incomers who abuse our hospitality, but grant citizenship to those who learn our language and culture, pay taxes and obey the law.
Thus assimilated, there would be nothing to fear; immigrants seem shadowy partly because we keep them in the shadows. Britain is changing. And I'm proud that it's a country in which my children will grow up feeling very much at home.
Mr Pelling, try and do the right thing ... just for once
Corporal punishment has long had its aficionados in Conservative circles, both as a judicial punishment and as a leisure pursuit, but this is new territory even for Tories: an MP arrested after his pregnant wife accused him of assault. Andrew Pelling MP can represent the good people of Central Croydon in Parliament only after being released on bail.
Clearly he could be found innocent and we must hope this is merely some hideous misunderstanding. After all, he only married his wife, Lucy, in November after deselecting his previous wife. But while he battles to clear his name, shouldn't he stand down? For some constituents, however unfairly, may feel a little queasy being represented by a lawmaker accused of such serious law breaking. Assuming he is cleared, he could fight the seat at the general election and - who knows? - head some Cameroonian General Wellbeing taskforce, sipping smoothies and promising yoga vouchers for pregnant women.
Normally, hacks don't like to make hay out of personal misery. OK, they do, but feel they ought not. That is why few newspapers have gone for James Gray, fellow Tory MP, who voted out his wife as she battled cancer so he could carpetbag another woman. If MPs were expected to resign every time one was revealed to be a prize turd, we would have a lot of byelections.
But David Cameron must despair. To reassure women voters the Conservatives are no longer the nasty party, he should order Pelling to step down.
Thanks heavens for Danielle, our latterday courtesan
Can there ever have been a courtesan to rival Lady Jeanne Campbell, who has just died? She conquered Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro - in one year. Oh, and as if to dispel accusations of left-wing bias, she also availed herself of Oswald Mosley. Even Claus von Bulow, no prude, found her a tad 'fresh'.
A duke's daughter and third wife of Norman Mailer, she died in Napoleon's campaign bed, a Josephine to the end. If men were her career, she sure climbed the greasy pole. She even shaded Pamela Harriman, 'widow of opportunity', who made do with mere Churchills, Agnellis, Khans, Niarchoses, Rothschilds, Sinatras ...
The exploits of Campbell, who stole the diaries of her mother-in-law, the similarly notorious Duchess of Argyll, suggest not all women before Germaine Greer were eunuchs. It's just that then a woman with a full social life was called a maitresse en titre, not a slapper. Indeed, having read a biography of Duff Cooper, I suspect that far from sex beginning in 1963, that's actually around the time it fizzled out.
Imagine what stories Campbell's pillow could tell. But alas she splurged an advance for her memoirs on a Greek villa and never wrote them. So we should be grateful to a latterday courtesan who is less casual with history. Danielle Lloyd, celebrated society beauty, is to write an autobiography in 10 volumes. A sort of Dance to the Music of Time, with fewer cocktails and more, well, quite. Compelling though her career has been so far - she is 23 - it is her life away from her photo-art that excites Bloomsbury. Her gentleman callers have included Lewis Hamilton, Jerome Thomas, Marcus Bent and Teddy Sheringham.
A thinner volume might take in her reflections on multiculturalism after that Big Brother rumpus. A treat will be Jade Goody flitting in and out, the poor misunderstood Widmerpool.
Who would swap the account from all three presidential beds about the Cuban missile crisis for the inside story of the night Peter Crouch brought mates down to China White for a few bevvies, ending in a hair-extensions-at-dawn ruck? Thank heavens the bon mots and insights of Teddy and his golden circle will be preserved for posterity.
All the best Lib Dem stories in the bag
Just lugged my liver back from Brighton and the Lib Dem conference. Most dramatic moment: my friend Nick Clegg being handbagged after his actually rather innocuous remark at The Observer fringe meeting. It was hard not to marvel at the magnificence of Lady Campbell: proof, surely, that the political wife is the deadliest of the species.
Indeed, only the rarest politician can defy what we might term the Cherie Law of British politics. I witnessed that at a convivial dinner in a Chinese restaurant with Paddy Ashdown when he began an anecdote which had his wife Jane spluttering: 'You can't possibly tell that.' But Paddy ploughed on, all about British intelligence stealing the faeces of a king to test it to see if it carried a disease. 'They even,' he boomed, 'brought it back to Britain in the diplomatic bag.'
He did have some words of comfort. 'When I took over as party leader, opinion polls marked Lib Dem support with an asterix - too low to register.' Which makes Ming's 20 per cent look like it's time to prepare for government ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/sep/23/comment.comment1?INTCMP=SRCH

Robert: Whether I agree or disagree, wasn't the point, it was basically that I admire the guy's chutzpah...

Edited by Robert Howard
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