This is in celebration of the UK "Liberal Democrat" Conference being held in Glasgow:

OPEN LETTER TO THE "LIBERAL DEMOCRATS"
Since the late 1960s I was a Liberal & then LibDem.

Then I was expelled from the party on 2 specific charges.

1 - Speaking in support of & believing in Economic Liberalism.

2 - Speaking in support of nuclear power (& believing it), including the need to keep Hunterston working after 2009, if we want to keep the lights on.

Subsequently I was told that a hidden reason was my opposition to illegal wars, ethnic cleansing, genocide & child sex slavery, all of which the "Liberals" were and are active supporters of. At the time I was unaware of the dissections of 1,800 living people by NATO police in Kosovo to sell their body organs to western hospitals though Ashdown must have been when he deliberately perjured himself during the Milosevic "trial" to assist the obscene KLA. Shirley Williams has publicly admitted knowing and I assume other senior party MPs did too)
I was also the sole member of the party to speak directly against the smoking ban, for the most traditional Liberal policy of free trade rather than having it controlled by some cartel & against having Scottish industry run, not by owners but by political correctness officers bound to ensure business was run not by economic sanity but to satisfy the "expectations" of every passing "special interest group"

Liberalism, the original sort, is sweeping the world because it offers freedom, wealth & a decent society people can be proud of & that is what the overwhelming majority of citizens want. Economic decline, windmills,dependency culture & visiting government busybodies telling them they can't smoke in their own homes is no substitute.

That is why I am now active in UKIP.

The "LibDems" are a totalitarian party, committed to ever more state power, impoverishing the people, ecofascism and indeed to war crimes to which even Adolf Hitler did not descend. If you are a liberal, in the meaning of the word the founders would recognise, you should join UKIP, the only true liberal party in Britain.   

Neil Craig
   For anybody interested parts I, II, III & IV of my expulsion are here.

   Unlike the large majority of LibDem bloggers I do allow comments from the other side*, that being what liberals do, I will be interested to see if any member of the party feels able to defend the proposition that they are liberal, in terms of the traditional meaning of the word, or indeed that the accusation of totalitarianism, participation in war crimes, genocide, child rape and dissections is inaccurate. We shall see.

*The exception being obscenity & fact free attacks on 3rd parties. I don't even always delete obscenity since it gives a look at the state of mind - as the LibDem branch leader who once defended KLA child slave brothels at a candidate selection meeting by saying that as soon as a local one was set up he would be enjoying their services can confirm.   
 

   This letter, from me, printed in the Spectator

:Sir:
       Assad is not remotely as bad a man as his father. He only became heir to the throne when his older brother managed to kill himself. Until then he had been working as a doctor in south London and had married a Syrian doctor’s daughter raised in Britain. He has already won a referendum moving Syria, over some years, to a pluralistic democracy. Do we think there is any possibility that the rebels will produce a pluralistic democracy?

He strikes me as somebody who never wanted the ‘royal’ job, and he is not the sort of wastrel playboy the Gulf Arabs’ children so often are. He is what is needed to encourage the peaceful evolution of Syria into a nation governed by the rule of law.

Our potential al-Qa’eda allies, by contrast, are poised to turn Syria into a murderous barbaric snake pit.
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    Now it gets interesting. I have ruffled some feathers at "Hope not Hate" (clearly the London branch) who have put this on their own website and had it planted verbatim in the Evening Standard:

Neil Craig
If Syrian President Bashar al-Assad thought he was running out of political allies, he may take succour from today’s letters page in The Spectator.

Neil Craig, Ukip secretary for Glasgow, writes: “Assad is not remotely as bad a man as his father... and he is not the sort of wastrel playboy the Gulf Arabs’ children so often are. He is what is needed to encourage the peaceful evolution of Syria into a nation governed by the rule of law.”
Now what does Ukip leader Nigel Farage think?
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The HnH site has a comment facility and I will let you know if this comment is allowed to stand there or if the ES allow it either.

"Firstly I would like to express my appreciation of HnH in Scotland recently confirming that the only major recent example of fascism here was the attack on Nigel Farage by a mob of pretend anti-English racists, some of whom were in fact SWP bussed in from England and that it "goes without saying" HnH will campaign against such thugs.

However I must protest the editing of my letter which leaves out the very specific reason for believing Assad is not as bad as his father,

".. He only became heir to the throne when his older brother managed to kill himself. Until then he had been working as a doctor in south London and had married a Syrian doctor’s daughter raised in Britain. He has already won a referendum moving Syria, over some years, to a pluralistic democracy. Do we think there is any possibility that the rebels will produce a pluralistic democracy?

He strikes me as somebody who never wanted the ‘royal’ job, and he is not the sort of wastrel playboy....."

Those are facts. It is, of course, HnH's right to disagree with me that working as a doctor is more admirable than being one of the Arab princes who waste their people's money in London casinos, after all we live in a free country. It nonetheless seems strange to me that HnH should be so contemptuous of working in the NHS, particularly bearing in mind who funds you, and your readers should have been given all the information.

If HnH wish to debate online or publicly either why they prefer casinos to the NHS or are enthusiastic for bombing Syria I would be happy to partner you.

 UKIP opposes that war and indeed is the only party to have opposed all our illegal wars. We support the NHS, indeed support increased health spending achieved in the only way this is possible - by economic growth, something the other parties consider less important than building windmills. Apparently we have much room for debate.

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     HnH being a liberal minded non-fascist organisation has published my comment sorry, being absolutely opposed to free speech and openly fascist has censored my comment, though they did pass another short comment from somebody else asking why HnH are so enthusiastic for bombing people.

      Since Nick Knowles, HnH's fuhrer, has previous being involved in bombing a Moslem owned shop (OK it was Harrods, so also a posh shop so that's OK) his enthusiasm for bombing may be explained.

      One problem this raises is, if we know for a fact that HnH, a fascistic organisation,  enthusiastically "editing" the quotes they claim to be finding and censoring free speech from anybody, including those they choose to pillory, are there any circumstances whatsoever under which any claim they make can automatically be treated as truthful. I think we should be told.

      So far the Evening Standard site is not accepting my comment either & I have emailed them directly as well as sending a letter. We will see what their attitude to free speech and truth is.  

The estimable Professor John Brignall from Numberwatch on fracking:

"Fracking is an awkward and inconvenient business, ironically only made viable by the success of the watermelons in cutting off other supplies of reliable energy. If you make such energy (the greatest essential for modern civilisation) scarce then its price rises until other sources become competitive."

So what we are seeing is second generation ecofascist parasitism. We have already been deprived for 40 years of the easiest and most affordable new power generation; we are now being deprived of the next new one, less easy and affordable than nuclear but still cheaper than coal and traditional gas and far cheaper than windmills.

Clearly the restraining effect on human progress is mounting but equally clearly this is an increasingly unstable situation in that any country promoting progress is inevitably going to find it ever easier to embrace progress and will get ever greater benefits from doing so. Thus providing an example to the rest of the world.

The only counterforce to this instability is increasing elements of world government. Only a totalitarian government of the world (and inhabited space) could keep prevent any nation choosing progress and providing the example. Once space is significantly inhabited I cannot see a world government being technologically capable of enforcing totalitarianism there - indeed a space habitat almost automatically couldn't be run by Luddites.

    "Civilization might recover from the damage of a nuclear war, but judging by past static empires in Egypt and China, it might never recover from world government, there being no chance of external intervention. As it is, present governments are only prevented from becoming dominated by crazy ideas that will suppress all opposition by the existence of other governments. The only way a people can be sure that their government is substandard is that it does worse than those of other countries."   late Professor John McCarthy

 
     2 of 4 graphs produced by Dan Hannan that show the failure of the EU.
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   Energy poverty hits Germany too.
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 Estonia, Europe's libertarian example, can supply all its power from shale.

   This is the 24 point programme I devised some time ago for getting out of recession, which no politician or economist has actually disagreed with, or endorsed:

http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/we-could-get-out-of-recession-in-days.html

I'd like to add this 25th point:

25 - Make it illegal for government to give any money to any charity that, in the last 5 years, has advertised for more government. That isn't a charity's job and the conflict of interest is clear. Similarly make a legal requirement that any funding from outside the country of any "charity" that has pushed a political opinion be registered and subject to a 50% windfall tax - half of this money to be earmarked for organisations committed to reducing the size of government. In the same way, over the next 5 years, be 10% as much money as our state donated to pro-government charities should be donated to organisations promoting smaller government.

The same ban should apply to any government department, quango or council and they should be limited to spending not more than 1/2% of their budget on PR/press liaison /raising awareness or such activity under other names.

According to Chris Snowdens admirable report  on sock puppets"Between 1997 and 2005, the combined income of Britain’s charities nearly doubled, from £19.8 billion to £37.9 billion, with the biggest growth coming in grants and contracts from government departments (Smith and Whittington, 2006, p. 1). According to the Centre for Policy Studies, state funding rose by 38 per cent in the first years of the twenty-first century while private donations rose by just seven per cent".

This suggests donations to fakecharities was at least half of the increase ie £9.05 bn (£37.9-£19.8bn) and that this amounts to 38% of total funding of 138% which would thus be £32,9bn. Assuming only the same is being spent directly by government this comes to over £60 bn spent by government on advertising how much more of it we need. Since that comes to over half the budget deficit it is clearly something we could well manage without.

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I am also including this under CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS 18 since, by reducing the power of government to frighten us with their "endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary (Mencken) would significantly improve quality of life and reduce the parasitic power of the state.
  

   This is from Lord Ashcroft's new poll. I mentioned his previous one on why people are supporting UKIP, which showed it was for our range of policies and even moreso, integrity, rather than simply anti-EU policy. Then he said the Tories should expect UKIP to win the EU election but not worry about it to much.

   This poll is a very large and thus fairly trustworthy one. News for UKIP in Scotland is good and for the Tories appalling:

the SNP’s continued lead on voting intention for the next Holyrood election: with 40% of first votes I found them 5 points ahead of Labour, with the Tories on 15% and the Liberal Democrats on 5%.
The Lib Dems did rather better among those who said they would use their second vote, rising to 13% and leapfrogging the Tories on 10%. The SNP and Labour would fall to 36% and 24% respectively, with UKIP’s share rising from 4% in the constituency vote to 11% on the list.

   If UKIP pull ahead of the Tories in Scotland what is the purpose of their party here? By spending decades "detoxifying the brand" by ensuring they put forward no policies that take on the alleged "leftist consensus" here they have merely ensured they are not worth supporting. Murdo will, of course, have been proven right, belatedly.

   There is also this which confirms my belief that the next election, like most of the others, will turn on the economy, something on which, because of our opposition to overpricing electricity and support of economic freedom, UKIP are well placed for.

 Asked what they thought was at the top of the administration’s agenda, half spontaneously named the independence campaign – seven times as many as mentioned the economy and jobs. Only just over a third said they thought the current priority was right; asked what the Scottish Government should focus on instead, the economy topped the list comfortably
      
   Brian Monteith has also highlighted this report today.

   With the LibDem National Conference at the Glasgow SECC from next Saturday to Wednesday I thought I would reprint this from the Guardian (edited by me because they emphasised it as anti-Tory alone).

   It shows how much all our officially supported parties, not just or even particularly the LudDims, have been hollowed out of real members and become simply the political classes, lobbyists and state controlled media repeating each other:

"A similar brochure produced by the Liberal Democrats said 34% of attendees last year were voting members, while 11% were non-voting members, 36% were "observers" and 7% were "exhibitors".
All three major parties offer commercial opportunities at their conferences as a way to raise money but campaigners have long complained that the events offer a big opportunity for lobbying."

   This is not new - some years ago I did a review of LD "exhibitors" and found they were almost entirely government sock puppets. I understand that being in power has made the LDs considerably more popular with donors, though much less popular with voters, a discrepancy difficult to explain if we assume such new donors aren't corruptly buying power. It may be that some of the exhibitors this time are genuine business organisations buying power not government sock puppets doing so - which would be a net improvement.

Of the Tories they say much the same (except they lead with it):

"The Tory party's commercial brochure shows just 38% of delegates at the party's annual meeting are members, while 36% are from companies, charities and other "exhibitors". Around 20% of attendees were from the media."

Of Labour, naturally, the Grainiad do not give similar figures though the first para here implies they are identical:

All three major parties offer commercial opportunities at their conferences as a way to raise money but campaigners have long complained that the events offer a big opportunities for lobbying....

Meanwhile, Labour is selling access to its "business forum with a full week balcony pass" for £1,292 at this year's Brighton conference. Its "package" includes a business forum ticket, invitation to a business reception and full week conference pass allowing access to all the speeches and debates taking place across the week.

It also offers a range of advertising opportunities, such as hotel "room drops" for £2,000 that allow conference guests to "wake up to your message by getting your flyer delivered overnight direct to their bedrooms in the Hilton Brighton Metropole, the conference headquarters hotel, which totals over 300 bedrooms".

   Any party that cannot attract as many actual members to its conference as lobbyists, government sock puppets and media hacks is clearly not a real democratic political organisation but a corpse being propped up by the state.