The Lights of Democracy Are Going Out in Europe as Authoritarianism Takes Hold.
Who Was Behind the Romanian Coup?
According to Călin Georgescu, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the person responsible for his disbarment from running in the Romanian presidential election was Tony Blinken.
Yet More Electoral Shenanigans in the EU
There is a presidential election coming up next month in Poland and the government (and the EU itself) are worried that the conservative will be re-elected, which means that he might put a crimp in the march to war. So, in order to curtail the reach of the conservatives a Polish court has ordered that the two most popular conservative TV channels (TV Republika and wPolsce24) have their broadcast licenses withdrawn. The verdict to revoke the licenses was issued by an activist Judge, Barbara Kołodziejczak-Osetek, who appears to be supportive of prime minister Donald Tusk’s suppression of the conservatives and has called for even more “radical measures” to be undertaken to “restore the rule of law.”
Since coming to power, the Tusk government has arrested opposition MPs and former ministers, withheld state funding to the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, carried out the forceful takeover of the public media and the prosecutor’s office, and has totally disregarded court rulings issued by judges it perceives as being pro-PiS.
Reacting to the verdict, conservative think tank Ordo Iuris said: “Denying the only two nationwide television stations critical of the current EU-backed Polish government access to viewers—especially on the eve of the presidential election, which is to be held in May—will constitute a serious blow to the freedom of public debate.”
Previous conservative prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki said, “A government that fears free media turns to censorship.”
The reason for the judgement was that the licenses should not have been issued as no-one knew who the broadcasters were, according to the fiercest critic of the stations, Professor Tadeusz Kowalski, a member of the Broadcast Council, even though they’ve been broadcasting for years and have respectable viewing figures (almost 20% of all viewers).
Opposition leader Jarosław Kaczyński called the move “the dismantling of democracy in a blatant way, without even pretending.”
You can read more here.
Germany’s Freedom of Information Act Is Likely to be Abolished
In order to “strengthen representative democracy.”, the newly formed BlackRed (Schwarz Rot or as it is affectionally known – Black Rot) coalition of CDU and SPD parties, is bringing in a raft of new measures. One of the most egregious is to abolish the Freedom of Information Act.
The coalition wants to “abolish it in its current form.” The CDU claims this is part of modernizing Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, and making it better at overseeing the government. Critics aren’t buying it. News outlets like T-Online call it a “direct attack on citizens,” not a reform. The CDU’s Member of Parliament, Philipp Amthor, a politician once embarrassed by IFG disclosures, is spinning it as an update, and the SPD’s reaction has been lukewarm at best.
Germany’s journalists’ union and the opposition Free Democratic Party (FDP, a pro-business group) are slamming it, arguing it’s a power grab dressed up as “reducing bureaucracy.” The FDP quipped, “The motto seems to be: ‘The citizen doesn’t need to know everything!’” Over 100,000 requests have been filed under this law—scrapping it would blind the public to government actions.
You can read more here.
The coalition also wants to make spreading “false claims” a crime, separate from existing laws like slander.
German columnist Nikolaus Blome, writing in “Der Spiegel”, says this “well-meaning” idea terrifies him—it’s too vague.” Die Welt”, another major paper, agrees: lying is covered by free speech unless it crosses into clear legal violations, and fuzzy terms like “hate and incitement” aren’t legal definitions—they’re buzzwords for activist groups.
They also want to “strengthen democracy’s resilience” against terrorism, antisemitism, and hate, by banning AfD politicians for Volksverhetzung (incitement), an example of this was where an AfD politician was convicted of incitement for quoting the government’s own figures on migrant rapes.
The latest opinion polls are showing that the AfD has overtaken the CDU and is now the most popular party in Germany.
You can read more about the coalition’s plans here.
German Editor Sentenced for a Meme
A German court has sentenced David Bendels, the editor-in-chief of the conservative publication Deutschland-Kurier, to a suspended seven-month prison term for defaming Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser through a satirical meme. The controversial meme (below), posted on Deutschland-Kurier’s X account in February 2024, shows Faeser holding a sign altered to read: “I hate freedom of expression.” Note, the image below is not the original (which was in German) but is an English version released by the Deutschland-Kurier.
Bendels was prosecuted under Section 188 of the German Criminal Code, which forbids the defamation of public officials.
(1) If an offence of defamation (section 186) is committed publicly, in a meeting or through dissemination of written materials (section 11(3)) against a person involved in the popular political life based on the position of that person in public life, and if the offence may make his public activities substantially more difficult the penalty shall be imprisonment from three months to five years.
(2) An intentional defamation (section 187) under the same conditions shall entail imprisonment from six months to five years.
Apparently, this doesn’t apply to members of the AfD who are demeaned all the time.
Earlier this year, US Vice President JD Vance criticized what he called “Orwellian” German speech laws, referring to an interview with three German state prosecutors who gleefully explained that insulting someone in public or online is a punishable offense that will result in having all the person’s electronic devices confiscated, an idea that they thought was hilarious. The interview, aired by CBS, was recorded amid a wave of coordinated police raids across Germany targeting more than 50 individuals accused of spreading hate speech online after someone referred to a local politician as a pimmel – which is German slang for penis.
Merz Indicates Willingness to Supply Taurus Missiles To Kiev
These cruise missiles, which Chancellor Scholtz refused to supply, have a range of 500 kilometers and could be used to hit the Kerch bridge.
“We ourselves will not enter this war, but we will supply with Ukrainian army with these weapons,” Merz said in an interview with the public broadcaster ARD, when asked if he still believes that Ukraine should be supplied with Taurus missiles.
However, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in late November that Moscow had repeatedly warned the any use of Western far-range missiles for strikes on Russian soil would mean NATO’s direct involvement in the Ukraine conflict.
One day he’ll lose his patience.
You can read more here.
Keir Starmer Has Given JD Vance the Finger
Vice President JD Vance criticized the UK government’s laws banning praying in public close to abortion clinics in response to this conviction. He also expressed an interest in the case of the retired scientist, Livia Tossici-Bolt [Across the Pond passim], who was being prosecuted for silently holding up a sign saying she was available to talk. The case was being closely followed by the US state department.
The US State Department revealed March 30 that it was “monitoring” the Tossici-Bolt’s case, saying on X that “U.S.-UK relations share a mutual respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms,” at the same time expressing concerns “about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom.”
Asked about the comment, a source familiar with trade negotiations between the U.S. and the U.K. told a reporter from the London-based Daily Telegraph newspaper there would be “no free trade without free speech.”
Keir Starmer, for whom every problem can only be solved by the hammer of the law, was made of sterner stuff and Tossici-Bolt was duly convicted and hit with massive prosecution costs by the same judge that convicted Adam Smith-Connor for silently praying.
The most senior member of the UK Parliament known as the Father of the House of Commons, Sir Edward Leigh (Conservative), observed: “It is disgraceful that in Britain in 2024 someone can be put on trial for praying silently in his head. To offer a prayer silently in the depths of your heart cannot be an offence.”
“The government must clarify urgently that freedom of thought is protected as a basic human right,” he continued.
As his government was the one that brought in the law, we can take what he says as mere politicking. The Guardian weighed in through the pen of Catherine Bennet, who is a member of good standing in the establishment after marrying (and subsequently divorcing) a member of the aristocracy. She called JD Vance’s concern about Tossisi-Bolt’s case, “sinister.” Bennet’s article, which you can read here, was full of things that Tossisi-Bolt’s ‘could have done’, saying:
Nor does anything prevent her from staging anti-abortion rallies, distributing literature, or expressing her views on abortion anywhere except right in abortion patients’ faces outside clinics.
You can read about the law banning anti-abortion rallies here.
The Guardian used to be a good newspaper until it was raided by members of the security services and the reporters were forced to smash up their own computers after they covered the Edward Snowden case. You can read the story of what happened here. It’s worth a read. Since then it’s been an establishment shill that mindlessly parrots government press releases. Currently, there are only two columnists there who are not afraid of speaking truth to power: John Harris and Owen Jones.
Of course, the person who was ultimately responsible for the raid on the Guardian was the Director of Public Prosecutions. If you are curious about who the Director of Public Prosecutions (equivalent to US Attorney general) was at that time, then wonder no more: it was non-other than Sir Keir Starmer.
You can view Starmer’s apparent plan for the UK here.
Military Veterans Are Elite for all the Wrong Reasons
The local council in the terminally dull town of Hemel Hempstead in the UK has decided that the annual veterans march to commemorate VE day has to be banned as it is “too elitist.” However, the council had no such qualms about organizing an event in the town center to commemorate its own 50th anniversary.
At the time of writing the council website that they run from their extraordinarily luxurious offices, paid for by ever rising taxes, is not working. However, you’ll be pleased to know they have become the first silver level carbon literate council.; although why they need to be involved in climate change (which is the central government’s job), instead of taking care of the services that the local people voted them in to do, is not explained. You can see more of their climate action hoopla here.
UK Police News
The Northumberland police want you to hand over your dashcam footage so they can scour it for signs of an offense; evidently, because the poor quality of their police drivers means they shouldn’t be out on the roads. It follows a serious accident where a number of police drivers, in 4 easily identifiable cars (the fourth is out of frame at the top, which had its roof and doors torn off) were involved, resulting in 5 policemen being injured, 3 seriously – see the photo below.
Meanwhile, just down the road in Yorkshire, the local police chief has decided that he no longer wants white people to join the force. Chief Constable John Robins of West Yorkshire Police, has decided that white applicants are to be barred from applying until after the Asian candidates have been selected and only then if there are any vacancies left. The person who is supposed to be in charge of policing there, Alison Lowe, hasn’t commented for some reason.
Chief Constable Robins leads a force that dragged an extremely distressed autistic teenage girl into custody after she innocently said that one of the policewomen looked like her “Lesbian Nana” (Nana is grandmother). You can see footage of the arrest, where a mob of what looks like 10 police officers, led by the extremely thin skinned police officer who the remark was aimed at, stormed her house here. The girl was accused of making a “homophobic remark” and was held in the cells for 20 hours before being released with no charges.
The police officer should be prosecuted under the equality act 2010 which: “…places a public sector equality duty on public authorities, requiring them to “have due regard” to equality considerations when exercising public functions.” In this instance it was obvious that the girl had a disability but they went ahead causing distress, anxiety and fear. Alison Lowe, the person in charge of the police, has not appeared to offer any support or even an apology to the girl, even though she is an expert on mental health as the former CEO of Touchstone, a mental health charity.
The crime rate in West Yorkshire Police’s force coverage area is 125 crimes per 1,000 people, for the 12-month period ending September 2024. The most commonly-reported crimes are violent and sexual offences, reported at a rate of roughly 55 reports per 1,000 daytime population (e.g. you have a 1 in 20 chance of being sexually or violently assaulted). It has the highest rate of violent crime in the UK (at 160% of other areas). The force even got a dishonorable mention in the Guardian for its extremely low conviction rate for sexual offences. The Chief Constable blames a lack of resources; although he can still afford to employ 19 diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) staff members and has spent £361,000 of public money training them, over and above their salaries, with a further £1.4 million used to ‘patronise the public’ with LGBT events and marches. Ex-prime minister Liz Truss weighed in:
“Britain has a serious problem with police leadership being ideologically captured and pursuing anti-white discrimination. Ministers should have to answer for this and take back the powers to do so.”
Birmingham Leads the World
New York was criticized a year or so ago for the size of its rats but now Birmingham, the second largest city in the UK, has created a race of super rats. At least according to the tabloid newspaper, the Daily Express. In a fit of extraordinary hyperbole, they said that the rats are so big they could attack your children.
The reason is that there is a refuse collectors strike going on for the last 8 weeks. The strike was a result of a pay decrease, of up to £8,000, because the council is bankrupt. The bankruptcy was caused by a £100 million cost over-run on an IT system and an equal pay award to its female workers estimated as costing £1.2 billion. The award was made because the council, which is Labour controlled and supposedly on the side of the workers, with-held bonuses for female workers while their equivalent male workers got the full amount. Instead of admitting their guilt and paying the £200 million that the ladies were owed, they decided to fight it through the courts, which caused the debt to increase by almost £1 billion.
As a result, garbage collection has been severely curtailed with some collections, like food waste, not being picked up at all. As a householder, you are obliged to store this food waste at home because to leave it outside would represent a health hazard, leading to a vermin explosion. Apparently, that order was not heeded.
You can read about the super rats here.
Britain’s Last Remaining Blast Furnaces Are Under Threat of Closure
The UK parliament had the first Saturday sitting since the Falklands crisis in 1982. The subject was the future of the Scunthorpe steelworks and in particular its blast furnaces. The legislation that was passed during this sitting, which got bipartisan support, allows the government to take over the plant in order to keep it going until either a new buyer can be found or the plant is taken over completely by the state.
The blast furnaces in Scunthorpe are the last remaining virgin iron producers in the UK, since the government greenlit the decision to allow Port Talbot steelworks, owned by Tata steel, to close down its blast furnaces in October 2024. They will be replaced by an electric arc furnace, which mainly uses scrap steel (like cars) and produces lower grade steel given that it contains impurities (aka siliceous gangue) inherited from the scrap, like previous additives used to produce certain types of steel. That means that the steel they produce is usually used for things like nails, screws, rebar etc. It cannot, without expensive additive reduction, be used to produce high quality steel needed for things like shipping or cars.
Much has been made of the transition to so called ‘green steel’, which does not require a blast furnace, instead it uses a gas (usually natural gas or hydrogen) to reduce the iron ore into briquets of pure(ish) iron called Direct Reduced Iron (DRI). This DRI can be fed directly into the electric arc furnace in order to produce steel. If hydrogen is used then no CO2 is produced. However, the process uses a huge amount of energy, both in the electric arc furnaces and in the BRI process itself. And it needs a substantial amount of gas, either natural gas or hydrogen, for the reduction process. And that is the problem, where would the UK get its gas from?
The government has talked about producing hydrogen from water through electrolysis, but that needs large amounts of electricity. Some countries, like Tunisia, which has huge areas of sunlit desert, can install vast solar panel farms to create energy for the electrolysis process and they then ship the resultant hydrogen. Both hydrogen and DRI are difficult to ship; hydrogen because it is such a small element it can easily find the tiniest hole to escape from and the DRI is pyrophoric, meaning it can get very hot if it comes in contact with water or even water vapor. Two ships were sunk as a consequence of water contamination of their DRI cargo. Given its difficulty in shipping, it tends to be used where it is created. India is the biggest DRI producing nation but most of their production is from coal.
The current owners of the Scunthorpe plant are the Chinese Jingye group, who bought the works from the official receiver in 2020 after its previous owners, Greybull Capital, who in turn acquired it from Tata steel (for £1), couldn’t make it turn a profit. Jingye had plans to make the plant competitive and invested around £1.5 billion in it, but a number of obstacles were thrown in their path by the government. The first was when the government sanctioned Russian gas, resulting in UK wholesale energy prices going from £40–50/MWh in 2020. to £80–100/MWh by 2023, which British Steel’s CEO has described as “uncompetitive globally,”
Then the UK’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), launched in 2021, added a further £50–70 million to the annual cost at the Scunthorpe site by 2025. Added to that, ‘Net Zero’ policies and eradication of UK coal mines drove Jingye to use expensive imported coke and ore. Consequently, the company is now losing over $900,000 a day on the plant and after Trump’s 25% tariffs were introduced, they decided to throw in the towel and close the site by letting the blast furnaces cool down. In order to try and save something from the wreckage, they sold their inbound shipments of iron ore and coke to other steel producers. Once a blast furnace stops working and cools down it effectively collapses in on itself and would cost many millions of pounds to restart (as it would require a complete rebuild).
Listening to the politicians, the fault lays completely with Jingye, who, according to some in the government, bought the plant purely to close it down, even though it was effectively defunct when Jingye acquired it and they invested a substantial amount in an attempt to make it profitable. There is even talk around Westminster of not allowing the Chinese to invest in British industries, despite the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, going on a charm offensive in China, trying to encourage more Chinese investment in the UK.
The business secretary, Johnathan Reynolds, said he wouldn’t have allowed the Chinese to invest in the “sensitive” steel sector, even though no-one else wanted it as it was losing around £233 million a year. He also said that he would reduce the losses, no doubt by drawing on his history and politics degree and his, unfinished, legal studies for inspiration. He has only ever worked in politics except for his time as a trainee solicitor.
Under the new law, Jingye has to keep the plant running and if they don’t then the directors could be sent to prison. Which is going to be difficult as they’ve been banned from going onsite. Eventually, the site will be nationalized and will become an ongoing money pit; in the meantime, under the terms of the new act, Jingye is responsible for all the ongoing costs until a new buyer can be found (which is unlikely) or it is nationalized. After this debacle, it is unlikely that the Chinese would want to invest in British industry, so the government has saved the country from their inward investment.
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Sorry, We Used Your Pension to buy a Missile and Russia Shot it Down
And it isn’t only EU countries that are salivating over the cash. The government in the UK has been eyeing private pension pots as a huge pot of ‘free’ money they can squander on pointless political stunts use to provide a “more secure future for millions of Britons.”
In what could prove to be a game-changer for both the economy and retirement savings, a leading financial services firm has outlined a revolutionary proposal that could unlock a staggering £100 billion a year from pensions in the UK.
The paper, titled The Untapped Potential of Pensions, reveals how the government, employers, and the economy at large could tap into this hidden treasure trove, paving the way for major financial reforms and a wealthier, more secure future for millions of Britons.
As the government prepares for the next stage of its Pensions Review, financial experts are urging decision-makers to take bold action. Hymans Robertson, the pensions advise firm behind the proposal, has set out a suite of measures that could not only fill the Treasury’s coffers but also provide a massive boost to the UK’s economic growth, green energy projects, and infrastructure development.
According to the firm’s analysis, unlocking just a portion of the capital currently tied up in pensions could help the government net up to £28.5 billion annually, while employers could see savings of up to £14.2 billion. Over the next decade, the UK could see £1 trillion poured into national wealth funds, driving economic growth and financing the transition to a net-zero economy.
You can read more here.
This is not the first time that pensions have been raided. Gordon Brown created the ‘Blair Boom’ by withdrawing tax relief for pensions thereby ‘unlocking’ (they love that word) the money for Blair to squander and the Sunak government demanded that UK pension funds spend at least 5% of their holdings on government bonds.
Regarding the savings for companies, they could take the form of ‘pension holidays’, like in the past, where companies decided that their staff pension funds (well worth a read) were capitalized enough and so they took the pension contributions from their staff and paid it out in share dividends or in propping the company up. The most famous case was the Allied Steel and Wire (part of GKN) pension fund which was completely drained by the management to pay its bills before the company went under. This was all nodded through by the government, who are now telling the ASW people who lost much of their pensions that the sums are too great so it won’t help them out.
Will it happen again?
FUD Watch
Wasn’t the raison d’etre of the European Union ‘peace and prosperity’?
You can read the article here.
This one is from the UK’s Daily Telegraph. It should be noted that this is the news outlet where MI5, MI6 and the Military issue their press releases as editorials or ‘news items.’ There is no link to the article because it is both behind a paywall and it is utter nonsense.
Stay Safe
If you want to know if your IP address is being leaked by your VPN and who to you can click here – if you want to know exactly who your computer is communicating with and sending data to click here. If you want to know if Pegasus spyware is installed on your phone (mainly iphones) you can download a tool created by Amnesty International here.
