Say NO to AV tomorrow

Nick Griffin and the British National Party have a clear, strong message for you: "Turn out and vote in large numbers to bury AV on May 5."

Under AV, voters would be able to rank candidates in order of preference. If a candidate receives a majority of first-preference votes, then they are elected.

If no candidate gains a majority on first-preference votes, then the second-preference votes of the candidate who finished last in the first count are redistributed.

This process is repeated until someone gets over half the votes.

AV will not benefit the British National Party or any other anti-establishment groups. The only people who will benefit are the Liberal Democrats. If they get AV, they will have no reason to support a move to Proportional Representation.

Nick Clegg said he “flatly” disagreed that AV is favoured by the Lib Dems because they would be the party most likely to benefit from the system. There is never any certainty how people will vote, but academic modelling shows us that AV “always boosts the Liberal Democrats” (PSA). As a party that presents itself as Centre, the Lib Dems are likely to win many second-preference votes under AV. On that basis, the Lib Dems’ share of seats would be boosted, at the expense of the other establishment parties.

Ipsos-Mori states: “one thing that is pretty certain is that AV won’t always help Labour, or always help the Tories, under all circumstances. But it will probably always help the Lib Dems”.

The argument that AV would be a "stepping stone" to a better system is flawed. Nationalists (like the Third Way think-tank) who put this argument forward are wrong. The Lib Dems would have no incentive to move to a fairer PR system as under AV their share of seats would increase. AV is about dividing power between the Political Class not about giving a voice to anti-establishment groups or the many disaffected.

Nor would AV help the British National Party win any seats. Even the secondary votes of British National Party supporters alone are unlikely to swing a seat for any other party. In a politically very divided constituency, we actually have a better chance of winning a seat under First Past the Post (FPTP) than under AV.

The change in electoral systems which would benefit the British National Party is a move to PR (proportional representation). This would give us (and other parties like the Greens) seats in proportion to the share of the vote we achieve. Of course, that is not offered in this referendum.

One of the most disgusting features of this referendum is how supporters of AV have sold out their principles on the hope of a bigger share of the cake. Originally, many of them saw it as a poor substitute for “proper” proportional representation: Nick Clegg called it a “miserable little compromise” as recently as last year. Yet he has been busy trying to con us into voting for it ever since.

Your choice is between a bad system (FPTP) and a worse system (AV). It is vital that all those opposed to AV go to the polls and deliver a resounding No vote on May 5.

BNP News Team

Bin Laden is dead

In a mission that took just 40 minutes, U.S. Navy Seals stormed Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan and took him out. He was then dumped at sea so as to not make his grave a shrine by extremists.

GOOD RIDDANCE!

Sarkozy and Berlusconi want passport-free travel within the EU suspended as north African migrants flee north

France and Italy have thrown down the gauntlet over Europe’s system of passport-free travel, saying a crisis of immigration sparked by the Arab spring was calling into question the borderless regime enjoyed by more than 400 million people in 25 countries.

Challenging one of the biggest achievements of European integration of recent decades, Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi also launched a joint effort to stem immigration and demanded European deportation pacts with the countries of revolutionary north Africa to send new arrivals packing.

The French president and the Italian prime minister, at a summit in Rome, opted to pile the pressure on Brussels and the governments of the other 25 EU states, demanding an “in-depth revision” of European law regulating the passport-free travel that takes in almost all of the EU with the exception of Britain and Ireland.

Prompted by the influx to Italy of almost 30,000 immigrants, mainly from Tunisia, in recent months, the two leaders warned that the upheavals in north Africa “could swiftly become an out-and-out crisis capable of undermining the trust our fellow citizens place in the free circulation within the Schengen area”.

The passport-free travel system known as the Schengen regime was agreed by a handful of countries in 1985 and put into practice in 1995. Since then it has been embraced by 22 EU countries as well as Norway, Switzerland and Iceland, but spurned by Britain and Ireland. It is widely seen, along with the euro single currency, as Europe’s signature unification project of recent decades.

But like the euro, fighting its biggest crisis over the past year, the Schengen regime is being tested amid mounting populism and the renationalisation of politics across the EU.

In other setbacks to borderless Europe, Germany, France and other countries have been blocking the admission of Bulgaria and Romania to Schengen in recent months, while the arrival of thousands of Middle Eastern migrants in Greece has fed exasperation with Athens’s inability to control the EU’s southern border.

The Franco-Italian move, following weeks of bad-tempered exchanges between Paris and Rome over how to deal with the Tunisian influx, is the biggest threat yet to the Schengen regime.

“For the treaty to stay alive, it must be reformed,” Sarkozy said. Berlusconi added: “We both believe that in exceptional circumstances there should be variations to the Schengen treaty.”

They sent a joint letter to the European commission and European council chiefs, José Manuel Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy, urging proposals from Brussels and agreement on a new system at an EU summit of government heads in June.

The commission said it was drawing up new proposals, tinkering with the current system, to be unveiled next week. But it has resisted, with the support of most EU governments, intense Italian pressure to label the arrivals from north Africa an emergency.

Under European law the border-free regime can be suspended only for reasons of national security, routinely invoked in recent years by member states hosting major international sporting events such as the World Cup or the European football championships, where individual countries contend with a huge, one-off influx of foreigners.

Sarkozy and Berlusconi insisted the rules be changed to allow more restrictions on freedom of travel. A new deal was “indispensable”, they said. The June summit should “examine the possibility of temporarily re-establishing internal frontier controls in case of exceptional difficulty in the management of the [EU's] common external frontiers”.

This, however, would clearly not be in the interests of Italy, which fears an end to the hostilities in Libya could spark an even bigger exodus. In that event, the letter said, the EU should provide “mechanisms of specific solidarity” including the distribution of immigrants among member states.

This will prove extremely divisive and will be rejected by countries such as Germany and Sweden, which have much higher numbers of asylum seekers than Italy, less restrictive immigration policies, and little sympathy for Italy’s plight.

The concerted Franco-Italian initiative also called for accords between the EU and north African countries on repatriating immigrants, a policy certain to spark outrage among human rights groups, the refugee lobby, and more liberal EU governments.

Promising strong support for the democratic revolutions sweeping the Maghreb and the Middle East, Sarkozy and Berlusconi added: “In exchange we have the right to expect from our partner countries a commitment to a rapid and efficacious co-operation with the European Union and its member states in fighting illegal immigration.”

Tuesday’s move followed weeks of feuding between Rome and Paris over the Tunisian exodus. Furious at the failure of other EU countries to “share the burden”, the Italians granted visas to the immigrants enabling them to move elsewhere in the EU. The Germans and the Austrians complained. The Belgians accused Rome of “cheating” on the Schengen rulebook. The French government promptly closed a part of the border with Italy briefly, re-erecting passport controls to halt trains.

But Berlusconi and Sarkozy, seeking to curry favour with the strong far-right constituencies in both countries, sought to bury their differences by urging the rest of Europe to buy into their anti-immigration agenda.

The EU Times

CONGRATULATIONS TO WILLS & KATE

The news is full of tomorrow’s big event; the marriage of our future king, Prince William, to beautiful ‘commoner’ Kate Middleton.

The vast majority will be out celebrating and many people from all over the world have already taken their positions along the streets of London in anticipation of tomorrow’s big day.

I will be spending the day celebrating with my family and friends and I can’t wait.

Of course wedding’s more a woman thing. The men will be drinking, cracking jokes and playing pranks, while the women sit and discuss what Kate’s dress will look like and what colour hat Her Majesty the Queen will be wearing.

There will be food galore and the raising of many glasses during the course of the day and I suspect it will carry on well into the night.

So, before I retire for an early night – I have a very busy early morning ahead of me - I would just like to say...

CONGRATULATIONS WILLIAM & KATHRYN.

May you live long, happy and healthy lives and bear many children.

35 radicals trained for terrorism at British mosques

Britain's mosques became an international haven for extremists who enjoyed state benefits while being trained for terrorism, leaked documents show.

The WikiLeaks files, written by U.S. military chiefs, reveal that at least 35 Guantanamo terrorists were radicalised in London mosques before being sent to fight against the West.

This is believed to be more than any other Western country.

Of these, just 17 were British nationals or had been granted asylum, while 18 had travelled from abroad – cementing Britain’s reputation as a global training camp for terrorists.

U.S. intelligence officers describe Finsbury Park mosque, in North London, as a ‘haven for Islamic extremists from Morocco and Algeria’ and ‘an attack planning and propaganda production base’.

After their UK trip they were then flown to Pakistan and Afghanistan where they were taught to fight and make bombs. The leaked documents also show that an Al Qaeda ‘assassin’ accused of bombing two churches and a luxury hotel in Pakistan was at the same time working for MI6.

Adil Hadi al Jazairi Bin Hamlili was captured in 2003 and sent to Guantanamo Bay where interrogators were convinced that he was an informer for British intelligence.

U.S. intelligence reports describe the 35-year-old Algerian citizen as a ‘facilitator, courier, kidnapper, and assassin for Al Qaeda’. CIA interrogators found him ‘to have withheld important information from …British Secret Intelligence Service … and to be a threat to U.S. and allied personnel in Afghanistan and Pakistan’.

He has been returned to Algeria but it is not clear whether he will stand trial there.

REVENGE PLOT TO NUKE BRITAIN

Interrogators at Guantanamo Bay uncovered serious plots to unleash chemical and nuclear weapons on the West, the WikiLeaks documents show.

According to detainees’ confessions, Al Qaeda mastermind Kalid Sheikh Mohammed claimed they had hidden a nuclear bomb in Britain which would be detonated if Osama Bin Laden was captured or killed.

Detainees admitted that Mohammed, currently facing trial over the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was involved in a plot to attack U.S. atomic plants and unleash a ‘nuclear hellstorm’.

According to the files, a Libyan detainee and close friend of Bin Laden, Abu Al-Libi, ‘has knowledge of Al Qaeda possibly possessing a nuclear bomb’.

Another told his interrogators the bombers would be ‘Europeans of Arab or Asian descent’.

The WikiLeaks documents, published by the Daily Telegraph, also reveal that 16 detainees sent back to Britain were regarded as ‘high risk’ by the U.S. authorities and capable of plotting acts of terror.

Yet each has been paid £1million of public money by the Government to compensate them for their unlawful detention.

The documents point to the crucial role played by London-based preachers such as Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza in the suspected indoctrination of extremists, before they were dispatched around the world to plot terror attacks. They describe Qatada as ‘the most successful recruiter in Europe’ and ‘a focal point for extremist fundraising [and] recruitment’.

Despite this, the London cleric and Al Qaeda’s chief European agent was paid £2,500 for being ‘unlawfully detained’ by the British Government, after being held indefinitely without trial following 9/11.

A ruling found that keeping him in Belmarsh prison, while he refused to return to his native Jordan, breached his human right to a fair trial. The Government is trying to deport him to Jordan, where he has been sentenced to jail in his absence on terror charges.

Meanwhile, Hamza is named as encouraging ‘his followers to murder non-Muslims’, in the documents, and yet continues to fight deportation to the U.S. because of Europe’s liberal human rights laws.

Extradition proceedings began six years ago, but he appealed to Strasbourg on the grounds that this would breach his human right to a fair trial because he would be given an ‘excessive’ sentence. The taxpayer continues to fund his stay in Belmarsh prison while his wife and eight children are claiming £680 a week in benefits and living in a council home in West London.

Three other mosques and an Islamic centre are also highlighted by senior commanders as places where young Muslim men were turned into potential terrorists.

Many obtained EU passports from other European countries such as France, but then travelled on to Britain to take advantage of the generous asylum system. The leaks help explain why U.S. intelligence services regard extremists in Britain as the greatest threat to American security.

The CIA is still so concerned about militant recruitment in the UK that it operates its own intelligence network and recruits its own agents among the Muslim population in Britain.

In a statement, the Pentagon said: ‘The previous and current administrations have made every effort to act with the utmost care and diligence in transferring detainees from Guantanamo.’

DM