The Dear Leader is finally making good his election promise of being tough on crime. It was anounced last month that criminals will from now on only serve half their sentence before being booted out from prison. Instead of having access to comfortable accomodation all paid for by the taxpayers they will now without any prior notice have to fend for themselves. The Government must be hoping that this sharp, short shock will show them that they can no longer expect to be looked after in the fashion they have become accustomed to, and that crime does no longer pay.
To my mind it is wholly irresponsible to go into the world incapable of preventing violence, injury, crime, and death. How feeble is the mindset to accept defenselessness. How unnatural. How cheap. How cowardly. How pathetic.
- Ted Nugent
Jeff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, visited Beverley early this month to steady the nerves of the Labour faithful for the coming election. Being used to hundreds of policemen to keep him safe from the common herd he was visibly chocked to se that there were only 4 coppers available to guard him from the entire local hunt, who was in no mood to treat him with kidd's gloves. He was pelted with eggs and well-rotted manure, and had to seek refuge inside County Hall. The Chief Constable have stated that the fact that he has been forced into early retirement from next month by the Government after having been made a scapegoat for the Soham affair had nothing to do with the lack of policing.
At least the People's Party is capably of learning from mistakes. The next minister to visit spent 2 hours in town on the first Saturday of the fox hunting ban. He correctly surmised that most of the county would be out following the hounds.
Unfortunately, during our first outing as the renamed Holderness Hound Exercising Society, a fox was flushed out of covert, and despite the Master trying to abort the following chase, the poor beast was unavoidably killed. But as the intention had not been to hunt it was all proper and legal under the Act.
One thing the class warriors on the back benches seem to not have realised is the fact that hunting acts as a cull of the older and weaker members of what they see as "toffs", thus saving the NHS from the expense of looking after them in their declining years.
As any contryman knows foxes are hunted using hounds. The bill, however, only prohibits hunting with dogs. Will it still be legal under the act to run a pack of bitches?
I made a short trip over to Norway this month to see my mother who is in hospital with a fractured ancle. The reality of Global warming really struck home as the ground was completely bare of snow, something I have never seen before in Norway in February. On the other hand, on returning to Blighty, we have been up to our eyeballs in snow. No wonder birds and flowers are completely confused.
My mother, apart from her fracture, was also suffering from septicemia and pneumonia and was in a deep coma. The whole family was gathered around her hospital bed as the doctor opinioned that she was unlikely to survive the night. Whereupon she woke up and told him to buzz off; she was not going to die, and we could all go home, which we did. She left hospital a week later, and we've had to cancel the funeral.
Ever since the Magna Carta was signed by John Lackland in 1215 people in Britain have known that they will be presumed innocent until found guilty by a jury made up of their peers. Blair and his followers have been chipping away at this right since the day they came to power; 9/11 was just a godsend in their eyes that would make the abolition of our rights more acceptable to the serfs. This Government is a much bigger threat to the country than al-Qa'ida will ever be.
What they are now trying to ram through the Commons without even time for a proper discussion will make everyone of us liable to be locked up in our own house, electronically tagged, denied access to information or legal representation in a court of law. It will be impossible to defend ourselves as we will be kept in ignorance of any charge against us. This is the working of a police state.
Furthermore there is now almost a certainty that ID cards will be introduced in the next Parliament unless Labour is sent packing after the election. Has anyone actually asked who the cards are supposed to protect us from? The terrorists responsible for 9/11 and the Madrid bombs were all perfectly legit as far as ID documents were concerned.
Think about this: a national ID system can only apply to UK citizens. Five hundred million Europeans have access to free movement inside Britain, not to mention tourists from all over to world. It would therefore seem that to this Government the greatest threat to our security comes from the population that elected them in the first place.
A Deputy High Court Judge resigned recently giving as reason that "This legislation closely paralells the conduct of government in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and is a step - albeit a small one, as all first steps tend to be - along the same path that led ultimately to Auschwitz"
The Heimbu Fair seems to be rapidly growing in scope. We have been promised several big marquees, and all the local organisations, including the Town Council, are now involved. Hopefully we can manage to keep the East Riding Council from interfering, and so far it looks promising. We are applying for funding from the Lottery, and will run Stav classes for the local kids through most of August.
After the banned colouring agent Sudan-1 was found in curry powder that had been used in the manufacture of Worchester sauce more than 470 food products have been withdrawn from supermarket shelves. Are we all coming down with cancer, then? Probably. Sudan-1 was banned in the U.S. as long ago as 1918, but it has been perfectly legal to use in food in the E.U up until a few years ago. And compared with a lot of additives that are still being used it is evidently not all that dangerous. The main problem is that we have been convinced that we don't have the time to cook proper meals anymore, and that natural food is somehow too expensive. The supermarket pap is generally completely tasteless, so we wouldn't be able to stomach it without artifical flavouring, and to maximise profit, shelf-life has to be extended by adding things that inhibit natural growth of bacteria and mould.
The other day I ate a hot dog, something I haven't done in years, and the taste was absolutely vile. Having a look at the tin it came out of I could read that it contained "mechanically recovered chicken (56%), water, pork (11%), wheat starch, pork rinds, pork fat, stabilisisers, (E541, E542), spices, anti-oxidant (E316), clucose syrup, hydrolysed vegetable protein, citric acid, sugar, dextrose, flavourings, casing, beef collagen, preservative (E250), colour (E-155) and salt".
When I was a child back in the Stone Age, we used to make our own sausages from the pig we slaughtered before Yule. . We used the pig's intestines as casing, and put ground pork with some herbs inside and just a pinch of salt. They were then smoked and the taste was fabulous.
I have been banging on about this for some time now, and I'm sure many of you are bored stiff by it all, but we really are being sold a pup here. Proper organically grown food is neither more expensive nor more difficult to prepare than the horrors that most of us put on the plate. In fact feeding your children supermarket food should be seen as child molestment. Instead give your money to small independent suppliers, butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers, delicatessens, farmer's markets, local growers and reputable on-line merchants.
Just a tip from the Heimbu household; next time you sit down in front of the telly, instead of opening a large bag of potato chips, buy 500 grammes of organically grown soybeans (cost 99p). Put the beans in a hot frying pan for a few minutes, stir to avoid burning, and serve as is.
A woman was dropped from a shortlist to be the Labour Party's candidate for Copeland after disclosing in the local paper that she had worked as a prostitute in Paris in her younger days. Compared to some people already in Parliament this didn't sound all that serious, but she had in fact committed the worst political sin imaginable - honesty.
Aki has found that the bank will only let her have 60% on a commercial mortgage on the farm until the house is habitable, so she called and asked if we could let her have £120,000.- instead of the £10,000.- we had already said we would cough up. Not having that much money laying around the house (in fact on checking I only had £5.- in cash) I dropped in to have a word with my bank manager. After a lot of hawing he promised to let her have the sum she needed if we serviced the loan until she could convert the mortgage into a residential one. So we are looking forward to a year or so of living on porridge and tap water.