THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO

Stop Treating School Refusal As Truancy

School refusal, sometimes known as school phobia or emotionally based school avoidance and is normally defined by off the scale anxiety, and it can occur from any amount of underlying problems including bullying, or an undiagnosed, unsupported Special Educational Need or Disability, or a mental health problem.

Whilst the underlying problem can exhibit significant difficulties in itself, the resulting school refusal leaves families in crisis, and a new holding code would start to measure the scale of the developing dilemma.

It would ensure a steady strategy across all schools, aid children until their problems could be addressed and ease families from the threat of prosecution for unlawful absences.

The decision to approve absenteeism rests with specific schools who are ruled by legal responsibilities, attendance targets and Ofsted goals as well as the pupil’s wellbeing, but none of the current 23 attendance regulations allows for a holding stage while the problem of school refusal is investigated and suitable help rendered.

Without medical evidence that a child is unfit for school, absence is consequently usually unauthorised and classified as truancy, which is a prosecutable crime, and budget cuts, increased testing, delays in , higher thresholds for mental health support and challenges securing and achieving Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), which succeeded the earlier Statement of Educational Need, are all compounding the dilemma.

Whilst there’s no reliable evidence on school refusal at present, the growth in homeschooling, prosecutions and permanent exclusions are all pointers of a significant problem, and a national Facebook group, Not Fine in School (NFIS) which started in November 1917 presently has over 4,800 members (February 2019) and has increased to the rate of 350-400 new members every month.

The completion of an NFIS poll which appeared in March 2018 and was completed by 1,661 families revealed that 92 per cent of parents believed that their child’s school attendance problems were related to undiagnosed or unsupported Special Educational Need or Disability.

Despite this, 20 per cent had been told not to pursue asking for an Education Health and Care plan (EHCP) and a further 20 per cent didn’t even know what an EHCP was.

55 per cent of parents were blamed for their child’s attendance problems and 25 per cent of parents were reported to Social Services because of their child’s bad attendance.

18.4 per cent of parents had been accused of manufacturing or influencing their child’s illness, further known as FII or Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy, and 67 per cent had been put under pressure to force their child into school, yet 59 per cent said this had made the situation worse.

A new attendance code is only part of the narrative and must be backed by extensive examination, thriving school refusal response plans and national supervision because it’s a daily fight to get a child to school with so much anxiety going on, and simply watching a child make themselves sick so that people can tick boxes is so evil, and at what time are people going to sit up and accept that it’s not the parents failing.

And parents of school refusers are being punished for their child’s anxiety problems and undiagnosed Pathological Demand Avoidance, but are being given warning letters about unlawful absences, yet parents have their own problems to deal with without the intimidation of being penalised or imprisoned.

People are signing the petition because until the stats reveal how great the problem is, there will be no incentive to do anything to help these children and parents, and those children who refuse to go to school due to anxiety bought on by many years of schools not meeting their needs, are separated from their peers and handled like dangerous animals.

This is why there are numerous parents that are now homeschooling their children because the school system has failed to identify or document that failure, and everything must change.

Biggest Broadcasting Union Joins Battle

Britain’s largest broadcasting union has joined the Mirror-backed campaign to save free TV licences for the over-75s, as millions of older people risk being disrobed of the benefit after the Tories gave responsibility for funding the perk to the corporation from June 2020.

But pensioners and campaigners are battling to save the necessary lifeline, and the Bectu broadcasting union is supporting the campaign, and it rebukes the Tories for U-turning on a 2017 election promise to keep the benefit for the remainder of this parliament, even though it had already given funding accountability to the BBC.

The Government made a manifesto commitment to safeguarding free TV licences for over-75s and now it is washing its hands of its own welfare obligations and expecting the BBC to pick up the tab, and that’s utterly unacceptable.

Not only should the government still meet the cost of any concessionary licence scheme, but there should also be a broader discussion about funding methods for the BBC so that everyone can be sure that its fate as a treasured and necessary public service is safeguarded.

Households with a member over-75 automatically qualify for a free licence, saving them £150.50 a year, but it’s not just about the money. Many older people end up being on their own and are pretty isolated from the community particularly if they’re disabled or even worse housebound, and anyone over the age of retirement should be permitted to have their TV licence for free because sometimes it’s the only thing they have left in their life.

But under the overhaul, the benefit could be restricted to save the BBC money, under a stitch-up where the Tories have sought to evade responsibility.

The cost is estimated to hit £745 million-a-year and Auntie is deliberating on whether to restrict free licences, means-test them or axe them all together, and the decision to shift the cost to the BBC was exercised in 2015.

But the Conservatives pledged in their 2017 election manifesto to protect the benefit, and Bectu’s submission to the BBC consultation makes the case for Whitehall to carry on financing the perk.

This concession is a benefit and, as such, liability for its funding should regress back to the government and not the BBC, and there might be a significant bearing on quality if the BBC is made to divert cash from programming and danger of jeopardising the future of a raft of major public service programming.

Free licences for the over-75’s play a significant role in promoting social integration, tackling isolation and improving quality of life for older citizens, highlighting the Tories broken election promise.

However, since establishing a government, they have assured the BBC that it will be free to take its own decision on the fate of concessionary licence fees from 2020, and these conflicting promises have forced the BBC’s hand and weakened its capacity to sustain current levels of production and quality.

The corporation has already had to deliver savings on an unparalleled scale and there’s no leeway for more cuts without a disastrous impact on quality and production, that will be felt by viewers and by members. With the BBC squandering the money licence payers cough up by overcompensating so-called personalities and presenters to appear on shows no one wants to see.

Most of the shows are all brainwashing propaganda for the left wing who control the BBC, and most of the material that’s on there is all worn formatted repeats, it’s time to scrap the licence and make it free for everyone.

And if it’s not made free, then at least make it a subscription. Most people belong to Sky or Virgin Media et cetera and pay way over the odds and then still have to pay for their TV licence, what’s that all about? The problem is, people simply accept stuff that they think is out of their control, and if we’re paying for a subscription to view TV, whatever the channels are, they should all be merged as one because why should we have to pay for Sky and Virgin Media et cetera and still have to pay for the BBC?

And what’s with the free TV once a person’s 75 years old, are they anticipating that many by that time will be dead by then?

TV usage should be metered like a lot of things are, that way we only pay for what we view and how long our TV is on for, that way there will be no subscriptions and if we can’t afford to watch it, then we don’t. I guess it could be classified a bit like big brother, but then they follow our consumption anyhow.

As it stands pensioners are made to feel like a burden on the economy, they’re blamed for the NHS crisis, with the government coming after them for more tax and now the BBC’s hopping on the bandwagon. Yet they have no difficulty throwing money at all and sundry, but the people who have grafted all their lives and have helped to build this country have to suffer in their later years, making it difficult for them when they should be putting their feet up and enjoying their well-earned rest.

If the BBC want to save money maybe they should prune back their huge lavish salaries of its so-called star presenters, yet they cheat the elderly of a tax break to justify the likes of Zoe Ball and Ferne Cotton and others.

If you view or record shows as they’re being shown on telly in the United Kingdom, which is deemed as live TV you’ll need to be covered by a TV licence. You further require one if you use BBC iPlayer. What many may not realise is that this is the case regardless of the device their viewing it on.

And according to research, over 31 per cent of students don’t know that viewing live TV on a mobile device requires a licence, although in most cases they don’t need two if they already have one. So whether you’re viewing live TV on a television, computer, tablet, games console, smartphone or any other device, you’ll need to pay the fee.

But you don’t require a TV licence if you only view content after it’s been shown on television except if it’s on iPlayer. TV programmes downloaded or streamed following the broadcast on other catch-up services are fine without one.

When we speak about live TV, confusingly it isn’t necessarily a live episode of a programme, it could be pre-recorded. Live TV is content that’s being transmitted on a TV channel. This applies to all channels including, say, +1 channels) on any mainstream TV platform, including Freeview, Virgin or Sky.

It further pertains to viewing live TV through internet-only services such as Now TV and YouTube, but only if you view content that’s also being aired on a TV channel, for example, if you use YouTube to watch cat videos or pranksters you don’t require a TV licence to do that.

So, online services that only show content on-demand, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, don’t need to have a TV licence.

Here are some examples to show what this means:

When viewing an episode of The Big Bang Theory on your TV, on Channel 4, you DO need a TV licence.

When viewing an episode of The Big Bang Theory via the Channel 4 online streaming service (All 4) at the same time as it’s being shown on Channel 4, you DO need a TV licence.

When watching an episode of The Big Bang Theory online when it isn’t being broadcast live on Channel 4, you DON’T need a TV licence.

Your TV licence covers your household, no matter how many TVs you have, but the rules vary for shared student accommodation. Additionally, if you pay for a licence at home, it’ll cover you on a mobile device outside of your home subject to specific conditions.

However, I can’t honestly see a lot of over 75’s being thrown into prison for not paying their TV licence, they don’t have enough room in prisons as it is, and hurling pensioners into prison for such a trivial transgression would create a public disturbance, as well as putting further pressure on the prison service.

Theresa May is continually banging on about ending austerity, and then she allows this disgraceful act of mugging pensioners of their TV licence, and it’s political deception before our very eyes, saying one thing, but meaning another.

Yes, let’s set up a system where super-rich people can dodge inheritance tax through trusts but let’s make old people pay for their TV licences. You couldn’t make this crap up if you tried.

The BBC is out of date these days, and the way in which people view television has transformed radically, and you can get more than eighteen months of stuff on Netflix for the price of a TV licence.

If you’re registered blind, meaning severely sight impaired then the BBC grant you a blind concession TV licence, which gives you 50 per cent off the cost of a TV licence, but you don’t qualify for this if you’re registered as partially blind, this tells you everything you need to know about the BBC!

This is such a dated tax, and the fact that it’s still called a TV licence says it all, and it’s a scam, it’s not a TV licence, it’s a tax. Turn it off folks, stream your content from none live platforms, apart from Iplayer, there are masses of material out there that you can view without having to get a TV licence. It’s just a stealth tax to pay a magnitude of overpaid stars.

And seeing as it’s the elderly who seemingly watch more TV and can least afford the licence fee, which is simply a typical cynical move by the Left-wing elite that govern the BBC to get more funds to pay for yet more politically correct programmes intended for the youth audience that probably don’t watch as much TV or buy a licence, but which is paid for by everyone else.

Cancel your licence and do something more productive with the money.

A chronically-ill grandmother from Belfast was incarcerated for six days after she didn’t pay her TV licence. Anne Smith, 59, from Poleglass, who has severe mobility problems and was awaiting a double-hip replacement, was ordered to present herself to police by 5 pm on the Wednesday of last year so she could begin a six-day sentence behind bars.

She was jailed after she didn’t pay a £1,100 court fine for failing to pay her television licence.

The mother of four, who has 12 grandchildren said she was terrified at the possibility of being jailed, and she said it was utterly ludicrous that they would arrest a woman over a TV licence.

The poor woman had broken her hip and was powerless to get out of the house for an entire year. In hindsight, she should have paid her TV licence but because of her health and the fact that she’d had to support her sister through cancer, she merely didn’t get round to it.

This is a distressing situation and the arrest and the incarceration of a woman for a somewhat trivial offence, and her family made it clear that there were mitigating circumstances given her extremely severe health difficulties and attempts were actually being made to meet the outstanding fines at the time she was arrested.

However, it appeared that because the bench warrant had now been issued, this was not allowed and she was instead arrested from her home and then taken to Hydebank Prison.

There clearly is an obvious over-reaction here because the system should have shown some flexibility because jailing a chronically ill grandmother doesn’t do anyone any service, especially when she was making good on her struggles to pay the fines.

It’s shameful that a 59-year-old chronically ill woman was sentenced for not paying her TV licence, and this is cruel treatment of a defenceless working-class woman.

No one was detained for the £650 million Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) bill, but when an ordinary person struggles to make ends meet they’re tossed into jail. One rule for the wealthy, one law for the poor, and it’s sick and draconian.

The government are simply filthy corrupt politicians who would steal from their own grandparents, presumably Theresa May as sanctioned this? And we send approximately £14 billion overseas in so-called aid, yet the government want our 75-year-olds to pay up for this left-wing TV propaganda.

So, now it’s picking on the pensioners with the BBC not wanting to pay it and then taking it away from the pensioners. Perhaps they should simply sell the BBC off altogether and scrap this antiquated TV licence for everyone as it’s no longer fit for purpose.

And clearly, they’ve sussed that there’s going to be an ever increasing amount of people entering this age bracket, next it will be that old chestnut, “We’re moving it to the age of 85 because people are living longer!”

The BBC is targeting the elderly now because the younger generation is using Netflix, Amazon and other streaming sites and services because they offer much better entertainment service, and it’s affordable and 100 per cent better value than paying for the BBC.

The BBC is going to die a gradual death and there are many people out there that are going to enjoy watching it pass into the history bin, but here’s an idea, let the courts send all these over 75’s to prison, where they’ll get a free TV, free food, free immediate healthcare, a free warm room and bed, and no bills to pay, and which costs the government more money to do that then accentuating over a stupid TV licence.

Politicians break promises all the time, so should this be the kind of situation where a voter should be able to go to court and obtain some legal solution? And usually when someone breaks a promise over something important, the other person can threaten to get the law involved, and you can prosecute the offender.

It’s your right to legal redress and not only for straightforward disputes, and normally, there’s some smart lawyer someplace who can formulate your case. Can you imagine if every 75-year-old took this matter to court, it would be the greatest thing in British history?

The thing is, politicians are elected to deal with the important fields of policy that affect the people, matters of life and death, going to war or funding matters that will determine society’s standard of living, the economy and law and order, because this is as serious as it can get.

BBC presenters get excessive wages:

BBC presenters salary
Name Salary band (2018) Main BBC job
Nicky Campbell £410,000 – £419,999 Presenter, Radio 5
Jeremy Vine £440,000 – £449,999 Presenter, Radio 2
John Humphrys £400,000-£409,999 Presenter, Today and Mastermind
Andrew Marr £400,000 – £409,999 Presenter, Andrew Marr Show

Gary Lineker, who fronts the BBC’s football coverage, is paid between £1.75 million and £1.76 million a year, supplanting at the top of the salary list the Radio 2 presenter Chris Evans, whose £2.2 million salary has been reduced to £1.66 million – £1.67 million, partially as a consequence of resigning from the BBC2 program Top Gear.

However, the BBC is a publicly owned sanctioned corporation created by the Royal Charter. That’s a really elaborate way of saying that it belongs to the people, there are no shareholders, and it’s declared to exist by law, no one else can call themselves by the same name, and is granted legal status by the Crown.

The BBC’s five public expectations are set out by the Royal Charter and Agreement, the constitutional basis for the BBC as presented to Parliament. These purposes outline the values the BBC holds when trying to accomplish its purpose to inform, educate and entertain.

So, what does your TV licence fee pay for? The fee you pay gives a broad range of TV, radio and online content as well as expanding new ways to deliver it to you. In addition to financing BBC programmes and services, a proportion of the licence fee adds to the costs of rolling out broadband to the UK population and financing Welsh Language TV channel S4C and local TV channels.

So, if we’re paying for a TV licence then why are we paying extra for other channels that the governments BBC don’t own? Well, the simple answer is company’s like Virgin Media, Sky et cetera, they’re in bed with the TV Licensing Authority which is contracted out to who knows where these days.

The requirement to hold a TV licence and to pay a fee is mandated by law under the Communications Act 2003 and the Communications (Television Licencing) Regulations 2004, as amended, and one needs to be covered by a TV licence no matter what device they use to view or record television shows that are being shown on TV or live online TV service.

One can’t download or view BBC shows on demand, including catch up TV, on BBC Iplayer, this includes TV’s, desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones, tablets, games consoles, digital boxes, DVD, Blu-ray and VHS recorders.

Even if one accesses BBC Iplayer through a different provider, such as Sky, Virgin Media, Freeview or BT, you must have a licence.

However, it appears that rambling politicians are beyond the law, with one competitor who unambiguously commits to one plan of action when seeking a public vote and then does something entirely diverse, much to public inconvenience.

However, the law is not well placed to help the discouraged voter. For example, you can’t sue that politician for breach of contract, at least not in the jurisdiction of England and Wales because a politician’s promise isn’t an offer which by your acceptance when choosing a vote constitutes a lawfully obligatory agreement, so in reality their agreement, promise, whatever you want to name it, is worthless, and what comes out of their mouth is all wind and piss.

But if we had a law upon politicians breaking their word, all that would mean is that politicians would then simply break their promises in a different way.

Law is not magic, but then politicians should not default on their obligations, and they should be answerable for what they say and do and should be fearlessly scrutinised by their peers and there should be extreme clarity of the political process.

Furthermore, if politicians are going to make promises that they obviously aren’t going to keep, why should the public take these manifestos seriously?

Not only do politicians continually make promises they know they will never keep, but they further know that they will never be held liable for those promises that they never meant to keep and will be uniquely immune from any sort of formal review method.

There’s no other position in the world that bears the same privilege from proper scrutiny, unquestionably not one that involves working on behalf of its voters, and all we see is them abusing their position, and it seems like all world legislators misuse their positions to protect themselves, simply because they can.

Political parties are pretty much immune from regulation when it comes to telling porkie pies, but then the people who are responsible for the conduct of politicians are the voters who put them in office.

Agony Of Homeless Mum-To-Be

Warming her hands on a cup of coffee, Mandy looks up sadly and says that she lost her baby because while she and her partner Sean were wandering the streets in search of respite from the bitter cold and striving to withstand biting temperatures since becoming homeless just before Christmas, their unborn child, tragically, did not.

Mandy, 47, said that the nurse said it was the cold that killed her child because Mandy was going through a number of variations in temperature, from piercing cold, to warm, to freezing again and the baby couldn’t cope.

Mandy was already expecting when her husband booted her out. Sean, 32, the unborn seven-week-old’s father, was evicted from his lodgings, and the couple worried for the baby’s welfare, so they went to the council asking for help to arrange an interim settlement.

They waited five hours in the council offices, only for someone to come back and inform them they could only accommodate them if they provided a pregnancy test, and went to an appointment with a midwife.

They went to the hospital, but the only appointment they had was a month later. Now it’s too late, the baby is dead! And they believe that if the housing officers had responded more quickly to get Mandy out of the cold she would not have miscarried.

It’s awful out on those streets and usually so unbearably bitter cold that sometimes people out on the streets feel like they might not last the night, and local charities have now reprimanded Tory-run Northampton council for constantly delaying help, and the authority has now reached ludicrous levels of exclusion.

Stan Robertson, 51, was once homeless and now delivers cooked breakfasts to the likes of Mandy and Sean each day, and the people that he’s helped have been prohibited from council services, and if it wasn’t for people like Stan, they’d have no one.

Northampton borough council denied that a pregnant woman would be refused access to its services, and a spokesman from Northampton borough council said that any rough sleeper who thinks they’re pregnant would be quickly fast-tracked into temporary accommodation in order to ensure they don’t have to sleep rough on the streets.

They further denied making it hard for homeless people to access services but acknowledged that the night shelter is only accessible to local people, and said that given that it’s a free shelter that gives meals, if they don’t insist on some kind of local connection then the taxpayers of Northampton would effectively be helping rough sleepers from everywhere.

In this day and age there’s no reason for people to be homeless, but with austerity cuts and Brexit being more important than the people of the United Kingdom nobody appears to give a damn, and numerous homeless people are being assaulted on the streets or are forced into prostitution.

Once out on the streets, it becomes difficult for them to get work because they have no fixed abode, and companies are really unwilling to take them on, and then there’s Buckingham Palace with all those apartments lying vacant, I thought the Queen was a Christian and had some empathy?

However, this is the fate of Great Britain, and it’s getting worse, and we’re happily welcoming a Dickensian Britain where we have the wickedest politicians in the history of Great Britain and no morals in society, money first, people last, where royalty get their weddings paid for while poor people get persecuted.

And what’s absolutely horrifying is that other people believe that displaced people make themselves homeless, but they don’t because the Job Centre give a date for an appointment, then they change it, and then say that they missed their appointment, then they sanction them, so they finish up with no money, and it’s even worse on Universal Credit as they now mess the money up for months at a time so then they’re evicted from their homes and other homeless people simply give up on the broken system as they can’t get anywhere or answers from them.

People don’t genuinely make themselves homeless, it’s not a life choice, and it’s an outright catastrophe, but people have no pity, so they go ahead and shame her, but people should not be shaming her, they should be shaming the person who made her homeless.

Perhaps she shouldn’t have got herself into that position in the first place, but it’s easy to lay blame when it’s someone else, but what one should remember is that is someone’s daughter and granddaughter had the pregnancy been viable. Most councils will ask for a doctors letter or something from the midwife as confirmation, and asking them to do a pregnancy test is a really personal thing to be asked by a council.

What does this council do, provide pee sticks to test if women are really pregnant when they come in?

I know how wicked things are in some areas as my son and his partner have a baby and they live in a bedsit and have been told that they will have to wait ten years before they get a one bedroom flat and that they will then have to sleep in the living room while the child has the bedroom, and the possibilities of ever getting a two bedroom are virtually none existent, so what chance does the homeless person on the streets have?

There are also other people who would never get considered for a council house or flat and have to rent privately. Some are living in bedsits with three children or more because they can’t afford a bigger property on Universal Credit, and I already know what other people are thinking, they shouldn’t have so many kids.

Next, the government will bring in sterilisation after the first child, or perhaps the government want to bring back Nazi forced sterilization as a law, and while the government are at it, why don’t they just bring back concentration camps for the women that even consider pregnancy?

Because none of this is morally ethical, but what our government labels as morally ethical is letting people from other nations to simply hop over on a vessel to England whenever they want, and then they welcome them in with open arms, give them someplace to live and put a silver spoon in their mouths along with it.

But the people of the United Kingdom have to wait because it appears we’re less significant, even though we were born here, and as I’ve said before, I have no problem with foreigners coming to the United Kingdom and they have been doing so for a long time now, but presently we simply don’t have the room.

Why can’t they just go to America where there’s masses of room, or Australia, why because they won’t let them in! After all, if the shoe was on the other foot and Great Britain was in turmoil and we required refuge in another nation, do you imagine they would let us in? Charity begins at home.

And there appears to be such a hideous attitude from some people who have no concept of what it’s like to be out on the streets, but everything can change in the blink of an eye, and those people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Northampton does have shelters but they’re not always easy to access due to restrictions, and I’m sure neither of these people intended on being in this position, and anyone in this situation needs care and kindness and not senseless discrimination.

I so hope that anybody reading this with a senseless opinion doesn’t become one of those people out on the streets who feel worthless. Whatever they did, however, they got there, they’re human beings, and life is a life, no matter what avenue of life one comes from, and no one knows what’s around the corner, particularly with the Tories in government.

Margaret Thatcher Will Get A Statue

Margaret Thatcher is going to get a statue in Grantham, despite threats of vandalism, as proposals to construct a £30,000 statue in the ex-Tory PM’s home town where it was approved unanimously by a planning committee.

It will be put on a 10-foot high granite plinth due to concerns of a motivated far-left movement, who may be committed to public activism.

The statue was formerly planned for Parliament Square in Westminster, but instead, it will be placed at St Peter’s Hill in Baroness Thatcher’s home town of Grantham, Lincolnshire, a place those in support of the application said she had put into the worldwide consciousness.

Lincolnshire Police said they didn’t reject the application but asked the committee to be wary around the security of the statue, and concerns about the statue being vandalised were at the forefront of some of the councillors’ minds, with one implying the statue would be better placed in the middle of a pond to prevent people from climbing it.

South Kesteven District Council decided to dismiss objections from the public, which included the potential for crime and disorder, Mrs Thatcher’s divisive policies, and public cost implications. Currently, the only marking of Baroness Thatcher in the town is a plaque on the corner of North Parade and Broad Street to show where she was born.

The statue, standing just over 20ft high, will be located in between the two current statues in the area of Sir Isaac Newton and Frederick Tollemache. It was created by artist Douglas Jennings, but the statue was denied by Westminster Council with a report saying it could attract potential vandalism and civil disorder.

But the Lincolnshire-based council chose to give consent on the condition it is erected in the next three years, but a small number of Labour Party members from the area protested outside the Guildhall before the hearing, displaying banners such as Grantham Resident Against Maggie.

The plan had 17 objections and seven people writing in support, with those in support commenting on the possibility of an enhancement to Grantham’s tourist offer, and during the meeting, the committee’s chairman Councillor Martin Wilkins ventured to remind the panel they were a non-political body, to which one councillor replied: “This is a statue of Margaret Thatcher, how can it not be political?”

A report to the committee said: “In general, there remains a motivated far-left movement across the UK (though not so much in Lincolnshire) who may be committed to public activism.

“Margaret Thatcher does, however, maintain an element of emblematic significance to many on the left and the passage of time does seem to have diminished that intensity of feeling.”

Councillor Charmaine Morgan said she would not vote on the application and spoke against it, saying: “It is currently being held in an out of sight, secret location.

“Perhaps it should stay there.”

But those in support asked why it had taken so long for the statue to be brought to the town.

“Very few towns can claim a prime minister,” one supporter said, adding: “Grantham should be proud.”

Although we should question how the statue of the most vilified Prime Minister in living history will be protected, it will certainly be a tourist draw, with most people and sightseers thinking about how they can trash it, and I’m sure the statue of her will draw many pigeons that will defecate on her, similar to the way she defecated on the workers.

Once again nobody is taking any notice of what the public wants and they will still put this statue up of Margaret Thatcher, and then they will spend a fortune keeping it clean because one thing for sure, it will definitely be vandalised on a regular basis, why don’t they just put statues up of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady while they’re at it.

Not only that, whilst the public fund the police through their Council Tax, the green lights been given for this monstrosity to be put in within the next 3 years, even while austerity continues, what a misuse of taxpayers money on such an eyesore.

How about using the money on children in hospital or heating for old folks, you know something useful?

Less Of A Threat To Society

Should drugs like cannabis be sold in off-licenses? Well, the North Wales Police and Crime Commissioner believes so, and Arfon Jones recently came out and called for measures to be taken to regulate the sale of certain prohibited substances.

He wants to see drugs controlled and sold by responsible retailers similar to off-licences that sell alcohol because he doesn’t see the difference between the use of alcohol and the use of cannabis.

The candid former policeman has further come out publicly in the past stating that the current war on drug crime has totally failed, and his opinions have produced a mighty response amongst readers, with many coming out either for or against the suggestion on social media.

Some people have never been weed smokers but totally agree with Arfon on this. The problem is some people are close-minded and they refuse to recognise things from a different perspective. Alcohol is one of the worst drugs there is, yet being drunk isn’t just culturally acceptable, it’s become glamorized.

Pot smokers are far less of a menace to society than drunks, and if you talk to a recovered alcoholic they would personally tell you how much harm drinking does because alcohol abuse can cause Polysythemia, Chronic Pancreatitis and Diabetes.

However, since medicating with cannabis some people say that all their conditions have gone, no more Polysthemia, Chronic Pancreatitis or Diabetes, but there are other people who say that starting off on soft drugs will lead to heroin and cocaine addiction.

People need to look at what’s happening around the world. It’s legal in a number of countries and States of America and Canada joined the long list, so do these countries know something that we don’t?

Portugal embraced a different approach to drug use and now that system is being utilised as a role model for legalisation due to its profound success, and the figures show prohibition doesn’t work, well done Arfon for leading the way on this new approach.

The grown-ups need to do some actual research because children with severe autism are being treated with oils and are able to communicate and play, and elderly people with Parkinson’s disease and people with cancer are being treated with CBD oils and are performing much better.

But ignorance is bliss and being brainwashed is the new hip thing these days.

Of course, cannabis shouldn’t be sold in off-licences because it needs to be controlled, so for medicinal use on prescription would be a good thing because on many occasions it’s been demonstrated as a benefit to a number of people.

At the moment there are numerous people who are purchasing CBD oil on the black market for pain mostly and it’s been seen to work, and it must work to a particular level because it’s really expensive and people wouldn’t buy it if it didn’t work, not at the price it’s being sold for on the black market.

But the United Kingdom, on the whole, are considered too conservative and narrow-minded to make those propitious changes, unfortunately, not only on this subject but other issues as well, and most of us Brits need to think outside the box.

Since Prohibition ended in the 1930s, alcohol has become broadly accessible and culturally accepted by the masses, whereas cannabis has continued to be essentially forbidden and moderately defamed, although these views are slowly starting to change, and there are still numerous people who think that marijuana is more damaging than alcohol.

Most cannabis smokers would oppose this intensely with this view, but is their belief supported?

Alcohol is by far the most easily accessible mind-altering substance on the market. Anybody over the legal drinking age can wander into a shop and purchase enough alcohol to get totally trashed, or stroll into a pub and rack up a substantial tab without issue.

Cannabis is considerably more hard to come by, and in many places it’s still banned, indicating that the only way to get it is on the black market, and even in the many places where weed is allowed, there may be constraints on how much you can get, not to mention the fact that high-quality bud can be prohibitively costly.

Although this has not affected marijuana’s notoriety, and more people are using it now than ever before, it still comes nowhere close to alcohol in terms of who participates and how frequently.

According to the 2015 Survey on Drug Use, a huge 86.4 per cent of adults aged above 18 years had tried alcohol at least once, with 7 per cent confessing to being big drinkers, and in comparison, a survey conducted by Marist College Institute for Public Opinion discovered that just 52 per cent of adults had tried marijuana at least once, and 14 per cent reported that they used cannabis frequently, with frequent use described as at least once or twice a month.

I frequently overhear people saying, let’s go to Amsterdam where we can smoke as much cannabis as we like, well, here’s everything you need to know about marijuana smoking in the Netherlands.

Though deemed a lowbrow kind of entertainment by some, coffee shops play an essential part in Dutch tourism, and figures suggest that 25-30 per cent of people who visit Amsterdam spend time in a coffee shop.

Cannabis is currently prohibited in the Netherlands, but, Dutch legislators approved legislation that would allow the professional cultivation of marijuana, and fans insist it’s a step towards legalisation, which will make the cannabis business more open and increase the degree and quality of the drug for consumers.

Yet, there are many people who believed that smoking marijuana was legal in Holland, but no, they were wrong, and despite the abundance of coffee shops, which sell cannabis over the counter, the drug is not allowed in the Netherlands.

It is, nevertheless, tolerated, indicating the authorities will turn a blind eye to those in possession of 5g or less.

Coffee shops are permitted to store a culmination of 500g of cannabis on the premises at any one time, and growers have not generally in the past been prosecuted if they’re growing five marijuana plants or less, and even though coffee shops are technically forbidden, they’re given licenses to trade by the authorities, are you confused, you’re not the only one because Dutch drug law is a murky old game.

Nevertheless, the laws are crystal on one matter, coffee shops are not permitted to purchase cannabis. Many coffee shop proprietors, therefore, use third-party buyers, who source the cannabis, no questions asked, and bring it into the shop.

Once the weed is through the door, providing it amounts to no more than 500g, it is permitted by the authorities.

If it becomes legal to grow marijuana, coffee shops will no longer have to worry about employing buyers to sneak it through the back door for them, and basically, the new law would make it affordable, easier and safer to run a coffee shop.

It would be a more simple system, and the coffee shop proprietor would be as normal as the proprietor of a pub, and as well as coffee shop owners, the customer would further potentially benefit from the proposed legislation.

The quality of the marijuana will get better, and the cost would not be so high, so in every way, it’s better.

Now imagine the average cannabis smoker, and you will likely be greeted with a far more chilled out mental representation, so based on this, it would be easy to believe that stoners are less of a menace than drunks.

The fact is, both cannabis smokers and drunks can pose a threat to themselves and others because both substances can produce impaired reasoning, coordination, perception, and response times, leading to increased accidents, particularly once they get into a vehicle.

In 2014, 9,967 people died in traffic collisions involving alcohol, a figure which makes up 31 per cent of all driving-related deaths in the United States, and traffic accidents are furthermore widespread in marijuana users than the overall population.

But, the precise figures are unclear for two reasons. Firstly, THC can remain detectable in your system for many days after intoxication, suggesting that you can test positive for weed long after you’ve sobered up.

Secondly, when marijuana is detected after an accident, it’s usually found in a combination with other things, including alcohol, and this fact makes it extremely hard to get accurate information on precisely how many traffic accidents are caused by marijuana alone.

It’s thought that smoking marijuana could raise your probabilities of a deadly accident by as much as 83 per cent. Yet, this is a modest number compared to alcohol, which could boost the chance by a staggering 2,200 per cent.

As well as being a danger on the roads, heavy drinkers further pose a substantial threat to their own well-being in general, as well as an increased risk of injuries, and those who drink massively on a regular basis are raising their chance of severe diseases such as liver cirrhosis and some kinds of cancer.

Alcohol is also extremely addictive, and as many as 15.1 million people (6.2 per cent of the population) are classified as having an alcohol use disorder, indicating that they typically abuse or are reliant on alcohol.

In comparison, around 4 million Americans are thought to suffer from some degree of marijuana use disorder, although this lower figure could be due to more limited access as much as anything else.

Furthermore, an estimated 88,000 people in the United States die every year from alcohol-related causes including diseases and accidents. This figure makes it the third most common preventable cause of mortality, lingering behind tobacco and poor diet coupled with the absence of exercise.

Alcohol is the biggest killer for 15–49-year-olds and estimates for a monstrous 25 per cent of mortality in those aged 20–39.

In contrast, mortality directly associated with marijuana is almost non-existent, and a fatal dose of THC, the psychoactive compound in cannabis, is estimated to be someplace between 15g and 70g, indicating that to overdose you would need to smoke far more weed than is imaginable, even by a heavy smoker’s standards.

So it seems that smoking cannabis is far more innocuous than drinking in terms of health, but how about other factors such as crime?

Crime is another area where alcohol seems to pose a considerably greater threat to public safety than marijuana, and violent crimes usually involve alcohol as an aggravating factor, and of the 11.1 million victims of violent crime every year, 2.7 million report that their assailant was under the influence of alcohol. That suggests that alcohol was involved in around 1 in 4 incidents of violent crime.

This figure increases for violent offences carried out against an intimate partner or ex-partner to as many as 2 in 3 cases, and 67 per cent of incidences of domestic violence have been linked to alcohol abuse.

In cannabis users, the opposite seems to be true. One study on couples’ marijuana use found that in couples who both used cannabis, the prevalence of intimate violence was reduced significantly over the first nine years of marriage, so these results imply that on the whole, cannabis users pose far less of a threat to their loved ones than heavy drinkers.

Another crime generally associated with alcohol abuse is rape or sexual assault. About 37 per cent of these violations are thought to be alcohol-related, and in 2015, there were 97,000 reports of rape or sexual assault related to alcohol among college students alone, and it’s further thought that alcohol could increase the probability of committing murder, although the precise data on this is unclear.

These facts appear to support the stereotypical view of a placid stoner compared with a violent drunk. Yet, there are always going to be a few exceptions to the rule.

One study on drug use and crime in young, inner-city adults found that those who regularly used marijuana were more inclined to commit weapons offences, attempted homicide, and reckless endangerment than those who abstained from the drug.

The three drugs found to be most dangerous to other people were heroin, alcohol, and crack cocaine, while those most dangerous to the user themselves were heroin, crack, and methamphetamine, but the drug found to be most dangerous overall was alcohol, which scored 72/100 on the researcher’s scale.

This figure could come as a shock to some people, particularly when compared to the next most dangerous drug, heroin, which scored just 55/100. Cannabis ranked much lower on the scale, with an overall harm score of 20/100.

Taking the above criteria into account, researchers believed it to be somewhat more dangerous to the users themselves than it is to others. And just in case you’re wondering, the least hazardous drug was found to be mushrooms, with an overall harm score of only 6/100 and the associated risks being to the user alone.

Neither cannabis or alcohol is entirely harmless, so the statistics imply that pot smokers pose far less of a threat than someone who has been drinking, although both drugs can seriously impair judgement, and for a pot smoker this is more likely to be the result of eating an entire container of Ben and Jerry’s than a drunk starting a fight.

The biggest threat that cannabis smokers pose to public safety is the raised chance of fatal traffic accidents after smoking, although the risk is unquestionably higher if they’ve been drinking as well. So whether you’re a cannabis smoker, a drinker, or both, the message is the same. Know your limits, be responsible, and if you’re intoxicated, please don’t get behind the wheel, for the sake of yourself and everyone else on the road.

MP Who Lied To Police

Disgraced MP Fiona Onasanya has been booted out of the Labour Party after being convicted of perverting the course of justice by misleading the police to dodge a speeding charge.

The Peterborough MP, who faces a likely jail sentence, had now been suspended and asked to stand down by the party after being found guilty at the Old Bailey in December, but she had been expelled before Christmas after a party chairman told the local paper that it would run a candidate in any by-election.

And Fiona Onasanya took the hyper-marginal seat with a majority of only 607 from Tory Stewart Jackson at the 2017 election only 18 months ago, but now parliamentary laws demand her dismissal as MP, but if her sentence is shorter than 12 months then a recall petition can force a by-election if it’s endorsed by more than 10 per cent of the electorate in the Cambridgeshire seat.

Fiona Onasanya, a 35-year-old solicitor, was convicted following a retrial of conspiring with her brother Festus after her car was clocked going 41mph in a 30mph zone in the village of Thorney near Peterborough in July 2017. The court was informed that she was sent a Notice of Intended Prosecution (NIP) to fill out, but it was sent back identifying the guilty motorist as Aleks Antipow, an acquaintance of her brother Festus, who was away visiting his parents in Russia.

Festus pleaded guilty to three counts of perverting the course of justice over speeding, including over the July 24 incident, and in a festive season editorial in the Peterborough Telegraph, Fiona Onasanya indicated that she would continue as an MP.

Making no mention of her punishment, she said constituents should rest assured that she would continue to be their representative fighting injustice in the hallways of power. But, she must be really shallow to endanger her vocation simply to evade a fine.

One would have imagined that you have to be of mediocre intelligence to be an MP, but this woman seems to be quite a brazen liar, she will do well in the political sphere! But then they are lots of socialists out there who would be quite content to have such a superior, ignorant woman like her as their MP.

And seeing as she’s a solicitor, and clearly knows the seriousness of what she did, she should be sentenced for an adequate term that would stop her from ever standing for any sort of public office, but then what’s all the uproar about? She’s a politician that’s been trained to tell stories, the more stories you can tell the higher up the ladder you get, I mean, just look at Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May as an instance, not to mention the robbing Nigel Farage and Brexit nincompoop UKIP party, which everybody appears to have overlooked.

Years ago politicians never got a wage, they were committed members of the community who had only the interest of those less unfortunate in society, but now we’ve gone full circle and you can presently really see what the preponderance of politicians are all about.

Not only do they get a huge wage packet, but now they’re maiming those who are in genuine need, and those are the ones that we know about, let alone the degradation of the green-eyed machine called the EU, and the larger the machine the greater the problems, seeking to suppress an uprising of millions when it all goes awry.

But the true crime will be when she’s given a suspended sentence because of course, we can see that coming from a mile away, but for someone in such an esteemed position, a deferred sentence should not even be contemplated.

She promised to fight injustices, yet she bent over backwards to incriminate someone quite innocent, and she should be booted from the Bar Association so that she can’t practice law at all because if she can’t uphold it, she unquestionably shouldn’t be practising it.

But it doesn’t matter what party they’re in, many of them are or have been misusing their position, and they should be booted out. She was elected as a Labour MP and that made her think that she was a cut above the rest, it appears that power corrupts.

Deception appears to be running especially deep on both sides of the house right now, and neither side is in a position to throw stones. Maybe it’s about time for us to call them out on it and to try and vote for people who more accurately represent our local communities.

Nevertheless, to do this we need to get past party politics which sadly the preponderance of voters are just too stupid to do, but we don’t need excuses from any politician’s who have distorted the truth or have committed any criminal offence, and they should never ever be released back into the herd because it simply confirms how dishonest and exploitative individuals can be.

We constantly believe that the person we elect is honest, reliable, trustworthy and will serve the people who voted for them. I guess not when Fiona Onasanya stated that her constituents should rest assured that she would continue to be their representative fighting injustice in the hallways of power, but how can we accept that when she herself lied to the police and courts in an endeavour to evade prosecution?

And she’s not the first MP found guilty of perverting the course of justice.

Setting Up International Base

The BBC is considering Brussels as the place for a new EU base following Brexit to enable it to continue to broadcast across the continent, and Belgium’s prime minister, Charles Michel held talks on the possibility in Davos with the BBC’s director general, Tony Hall.

Belgium is usually on the shortlist of companies keen to anchor in the European Union following Brexit, but it’s further understood that the BBC is looking at the Netherlands and Ireland as possible localities for the new offshoot.

The BBC will require EU-based licences for its international channels which include BBC World, BBC Entertainment, BBC First, and BBC Earth if it wants to have them broadcast across the rest of Europe either following 29 March, if the UK leaves without an agreement, or following the transition period, should Theresa May’s agreement be ratified by parliament.

The Prime Minister has been trying to include the audiovisual industry in a free trade agreement to circumvent the problem, but her pleas have been disregarded, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, affirmed his opposition to Downing Street’s request, and he said in a letter to a concerned group that he had no plan on allowing the United Kingdom to continue to dominate the industry.

France has consistently defended the exclusion of audiovisual services from free trade agreements, and he wrote that it was an essential issue, which concerned the protection of cultural diversity, and he stated that France has made it a principal feature in every trade negotiation. It has therefore obtained, in all the free trade agreements the EU has concluded, the exclusion of audiovisual services.

As a consequence, to secure a pan-EU broadcast licence, the BBC will need to have either its head office, or a vital part of the workforce of the relevant channel, or a satellite uplink in a member state to qualify for a licence there, a request which could lead to the broadcaster moving some staff and services into the EU.

More than 500 pan-European channels use licences distributed by the British regulator Ofcom, and international media companies reportedly spend approximately £1 billion a year in the United Kingdom, making it the most significant such hub.

Yet, after Brexit, the licences are expected to be void as the United Kingdom will have left the EU’s single market, with the British online sports channel DAZN announcing it was opening a development centre in Amsterdam as it endeavoured to achieve its goal of becoming the Netflix of sports.

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The channel provides live streams of Champions League football, Formula One and the ATP tennis tour in both English and German speaking countries plus Japan. Turner Broadcasting System Deutschland and NBC Universal Global Networks Deutschland have also taken measures to secure EU licences.

BBC Studios, a commercial branch of the BBC, runs a number of bespoke TV channels outside of the United Kingdom, including some that are transmitted in the European Union so they will be keeping the situation under tight review to ensure that they can continue to fully serve their audiences in any changed regulatory environment.

No Deal Brexit

A no deal Brexit would be a betrayal of what people voted for because in the 2016 election a promise was made to the preponderance of people who voted for Brexit, and they were voting for a more prosperous future, but not leaving now would be regarded as a betrayal of that referendum decision.

However, leaving without a deal would threaten our future prosperity, and would equally represent a betrayal of the promises that were made, but Theresa May has repeatedly declined to rule out a no deal Brexit despite warnings from industry about the harm it would do to the economy.

Airbus delivered one of the stiffest business warnings to date, branding the government’s handling of the EU departure a scandal and said the company could pull out of the UK if Brexit undermines its capacity to compete, and the UK’s multibillion-pound aerospace sector is standing at a cliff.

Brexit is threatening to slaughter a century of development based on education, research and human capital, and if there’s a no-deal Brexit, Airbus will have to make possibly really harmful decisions for the UK, and Jeremy Corbyn has declined to meet the Prime Minister unless she rules out a no deal.

The best course of action is a negotiated agreement, but after the Prime Minister’s deal yielded a humiliating disappointment in the House of Commons Theresa May has grappled to come up with an alternative that MPs will support and that doesn’t cross her red lines.

The only sustainable solution is a negotiated agreement with the EU if we are to leave the European Union in a way that preserves our economy in order to allow us to achieve that future prosperity that voters were promised.

And if the Prime Minister fails to heed warnings and proceeds to refuse to take a no deal off the table then there’s no other alternative, she must quit.

A no-deal departure would be disloyalty to the people of the United Kingdom, but from the Prime Minister’s viewpoint, what’s important is delivering on the vote of the British people and leaving the EU with a deal or no deal, it’s essentially like a game show.

Maybe it’s time to close down parliament and start again, after all, politicians that are sitting in the House of Commons are nothing more than a misuse of public money, and then there are the lies and dishonesty that we see every single day in the House of Commons and it’s an absolute scandal.

And it’s no surprise that people have no respect for them because respect has to be earned, and what they’re doing is the biggest betrayal of the British voters in the countries history. Maybe it’s time for them to reflect on their actions and take a hard look at what’s happening right across the European bloc because politicians don’t appear to want to listen to the people.

Maybe they want civil unrest, who knows, but when the crap hits the fan, and it looks like it will, particularly with the army being put on standby, all we should hope is that they don’t revert to physical brutality against the people of this country because this will not be accepted by the British people.

Russian Interference

There have been concerns that there was Russian intervention in the 2016 Brexit election, and there’s an ongoing investigation by the UK Electoral Commission, the UK Parliament’s Culture Select Committee, and the US Senate on alleged Russian interference, and this has raised questions over the legal validity of the Brexit referendum.

Following the election on the United Kingdom exiting the European Union (Brexit), the former Prime Minister David Cameron implied that Russia might be pleased with a positive Brexit referendum, and the official Remain campaign accused the Kremlin of secretly backing a positive Brexit vote.

And in March 2016, Philip Hammond, the former Secretary for Defence and Foreign Secretary, later the Chancellor of the Exchequer said that the only country who would like us to leave the EU was Russia, and in December 2016, Ben Bradshaw MP maintained in Parliament that Russia had interfered in the Brexit election campaign.

February 2017, Ben Bradshaw called on the British intelligence service, Government Communications Headquarters, then under Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary, to disclose any information it had on Russian intervention.

And in October 2017, Members of Parliament in the Culture, Media and Sports Committee demanded that Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social media corporations reveal all adverts and details of payments by Russia in the Brexit campaign.

In November 2017, it became common knowledge that Matthew Elliott, the chief executive of the Vote Leave, was a founding member of the Conservative Friends of Russia, and had been a target asset by someone known to be a Russian operative.

On the12 December 2017, members of the US Congress Ruben Gallego, Eric Swalwell and Gerry Connolly wrote to the Director of National Intelligence asking for information on Russian intervention in the Brexit vote, and on 13 December 2017, Facebook said that it found no significant Russian activity throughout Brexit, but this clarification needed was promptly rebuffed by the committee chair, Damian Collins, as being information that was already public following US inquiries into Russian intervention.

In January 2018, a US Senate minority report suggested potential ways Russia may have influenced the Brexit campaign. It was said that the Russian government had attempted to influence democracy in the United Kingdom through disinformation, cyber hacking and corruption.

And whilst a comprehensive understanding of the extent and type of Kremlin intervention in the UK’s June 2016 election is still surfacing, Prime Minister Theresa May and the UK government have rebuked the Kremlin’s active measures, and numerous UK government entities, including the Electoral Commission and parliamentarians, have launched investigations into various aspects of potential Russian government interference.

In June 2018, The Guardian implied that Arron Banks, the largest contributor to the campaign for leaving, and co-organiser of Leave received the offer of a Russian gold mine and had a string of meetings with the Russian Ambassador.

But on the 14 June 2018, Arron Banks appeared before a Parliamentary committee hearing, where he seemed to confess to having lied about his engagements with Russians, and later walked out declining to respond to any more questions by citing a luncheon meeting with the Democratic Unionist Party.

In July 2018, the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee, released an interim report on Disinformation and fake news, declaring that Russia had engaged in unconventional warfare through Twitter and other social media against the United Kingdom, created to increase support for a Leave vote in Brexit.

And on 20 September, aggregate IQ, a Canadian political consultancy and analytics company, received the first General Data Protection Regulation (GDRR) notice issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for using people’s data for purposes which they would not have expected.

Several pro-Brexit campaigns paid the company £3.5 million to target advertisements at prospective voters. While its Brexit work was before the GDPR went into force, it was fined because it retained and continued to use the data after the GDPR came into complete force.

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The company is affiliated with the SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica, and Cambridge Analytica employees sometimes called Aggregate IQ, but in November 2018, a criminal investigation of Arron Banks was launched after the Electoral Commission concluded that they had just grounds to suspect that Mr Banks was not the actual source of the £8 million reported as loans and that numerous criminal aggressions may have been committed.

Arron Banks was the biggest contributor to the Brexit campaign, but previous to the donations, Southern Rock, Arron Banks underwriting company was technically insolvent and needed to obtain £60 million to meet regulations.

It was saved by a £77 million cash injection, mostly in September 2015 from another company, ICS Risk Solutions which Arron Banks claimed to own when challenged by MP Rebecca Pow, although it appeared from company filings that he didn’t own all of it.

At the time Louise Kentish from the company called STM joined the board, but the day after the election, her husband Alan Kentish, CEO of STM and other STM people joined as well. STM specialises in opaque wealth management using trusts and similar.

About the same time, Arron Banks, along with Andy Wigmore started having various meetings with Russian officials posted at the Russian embassy in London.

Furthermore, according to his South African business partner, Christopher Kimber, Arron Banks had been in Russia seeking to raise funds around that time, and Christopher Kimber said that he was eventually made aware in October 2015, and that in fact, Arron Banks had been dealing with Russians who considered investing in mines, and he was told by Arron Banks that he had gone to Russia and discuss with them the diamond opportunities as well as gold mining opportunities in Russia and that he further indicated that he would be meeting with the Russians again during November 2015.

Months following the cash injection Arron Banks began making substantial contributions to political causes including the £8 million to the Brexit campaigns.

And Russia’s efforts to influence British democracy and the possible vulnerability of parts of the UK political system to anti-democratic interference during the EU election were revealed in a report prepared by the US Senate.

The report which was titled Putin’s asymmetric assault on democracy in Russia and Europe included implications for US national security, it pinpointed the way in which UK campaign finance laws did not need disclosure of political contributions if they were from the beneficial owners of non-British companies that were included in the EU and carried out business in the UK.

This opacity, the report implies, may have enabled Russian-related money to be directed with insufficient scrutiny to various UK political actors, and investigative journalists have also raised questions about the sources of the sudden and perhaps unlawful wealth that may have been directed to support the Brexit Leave campaign. The UK Electoral Commission has now launched an inquiry into the matter.

The senators point out that UKIP and its then-leader, Nigel Farage, did not simply fan anti-EU sentiment but further criticised European sanctions on Russia, and provided flattering assessments of Russian President Putin.

The report adds that even though officially the Russian government declared its impartiality on Brexit, its English-language media outlets RT and Sputnik covered the election campaign widely and offered systematically one-sided coverage.

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The senators further challenge the adequacy of the investigations by Facebook and Twitter into the allegations of extensive social media intervention by the Russians during the election. They reference University of Edinburgh research showing more than 400 Russian-run Twitter accounts that had been active in the US election had further been actively posting about Brexit.

In addition, the senators noted that research led by a collective team of experts from the University of California at Berkeley and Swansea University reportedly identified 150,000 Twitter accounts with numerous Russian ties that distributed information about Brexit.

The report further points to the huge surge of Russian money into the UK, including the London property market. It records how the Metropolitan police noted that a cumulative value of £180 million in properties in the United Kingdom had been put under investigation as perhaps obtained with fraudulent proceeds by secretive offshore companies.

The fundamental responsibility of all leaders and citizens of a democracy is to protect its elections from subversion, but we’ve learned a lot about Russia’s alleged involvement in the EU election.

Theresa May stated that Vladimir Putin’s government was attempting to undermine free societies and was farming bogus stories to plant discord in the West, even though the Prime Minister then seemed to relax her language and told parliament that if Labour MPs bothered to look at the address that she gave they would see that the examples that she gave of Russian interference were not in the United Kingdom.

But if Russia has been cited of interfering in recent elections in America, France and elsewhere, what about Britain? And to understand the accusations of Russian involvement in the EU election we should first look at its reported links to the US presidential election.

Many of the accusations focus on the Russian Internet Research Agency. The company, based in Saint Petersburg which creates online media posts that are beneficial to Russian government interests. The Agency was making the headlines as far back as April 2015, when Donald Trump was still the guy off the Apprentice and Brexit was a word whispered only in the back rooms of the Conservative Party headquarters.

At the time, the Guardian published an investigation “Inside a Russian troll house”. They found hundreds of bloggers who were paid to swamp forums and social networks at home and abroad with anti-western and pro-Kremlin comments, and it’s thought that this is the home of the Agency and the nexus of Russia’s efforts to use social media to influence overseas politics.

But if we skip forward to January 2017, six months post-referendum and six weeks after Mr Trump’s election, the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence published a report that concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.

However, more was found out about how the Agency works, after a former employee reported to an independent TV channel that the company’s intention wasn’t to turn Americans toward Russia, the aim was to set Americans against their own government, to provoke unrest, provoke dissatisfaction, and to diminish Barack Obama’s ratings.

The New York Times reported that Russian agents and disseminated inflammatory posts had reached 126 million users on Facebook, published more than 131,000 messages on Twitter and uploaded over 1,000 videos to Google’s YouTube service before the US presidential election.

The reports were extracted from detailed disclosures sent to Congress by companies whose products were amongst the most widely used on the internet, and a BuzzFeed investigation affirmed that the Russian government made wire transfers to more than 60 Russian embassies between August and September 2016.

BuzzFeed reported that the transfers were sent with a message “to finance election campaign of 2016.” And a spokesperson for the Russian government stated that the money was intended to help embassies cover the expense of helping Russian nationals living overseas to vote in the country’s own parliamentary election, which took place in September 2016.

What’s not clear is whether any of this activity was connected to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, that question will be clarified in the course of the five federal investigations that are underway in the US.

It’s also worth pointing out that some efforts to uncover Russian-controlled bogus accounts have been fallacious when a report from the Scotsman determined that an alleged Russian online troll identified on a leading news website was really a security guard from Glasgow.

So, did Russian bogus accounts attempt to influence the EU election? Well, according to reports, the Russian Internet Research Agency built up a notable social media presence in the run-up to the US presidential election, which was allegedly able to reach hundreds of millions of users.

But what about the United Kingdom? What proof do we have so far of Russian sway on the Brexit referendum?

In October 2017, research from City, University of London discovered that a 13,500-strong Twitter bot army was present on the social media site about the time of the election.

Twitter bots are accounts that are not managed by actual people but rather post content automatically. The accounts sometimes assume a bogus persona to draw real users to their posts, and it’s thought that these accounts established a chain of zombie agents.

Yet, there was no indication that bots served to cast bogus news, rather, they were invested in feeding and echoing user-curated, hyper-partisan and polarising information, and in the four weeks preceding the referendum, the accounts posted a total of 65,000 tweets about the election, tweets that were described as showing a definite slant towards a Leave campaign.

Nevertheless, it’s worth saying that the researchers didn’t suggest any Russian involvement, but that additional research into Twitter bots and the Brexit referendum was published by the Oxford Internet Institute.

It looked at 22.6 million tweets and cross-referred them with 2,752 accounts that the US Senate has identified as creations of the Russian Internet Research Agency, and researcher Yin Yin Lu said that she found 416 tweets from the Russian accounts from March to July 2016, the months preceding the EU election.

She was careful to point out that the number of these tweets was important to highlight. So there are about 400 tweets here out of 22.6 million. That’s a really infinitesimal fraction. So the word interference was possibly a tad inflated, although the tweets did seem to be ordered, with accounts clearly retweeting and sharing each other’s content.

A second report this time from the University of Edinburgh found a greater amount of tweets about Brexit from the Russian Internet Research Agency, with researchers identifying 419 accounts running from the Agency that were endeavouring to influence UK politics. The accounts were on the roster of 2,752 accounts suspended by Twitter in the US.

Separately, an upcoming paper from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Swansea University was set to unveil an even wider network of pro-Brexit Russian bots, and the research which had been seen by a newspaper tracked over 150,000 Russian accounts that used the hashtag “Brexit”, most of which was advocating Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.

One account, “Svetal1972”, posted 92 tweets between 20 and 24 June, including one that called for Britain to “make June the 23rd our Independence Day”. But why would Russia want Brexit to happen anyhow? Well, there’s some indication of Russian involvement in spreading pro-Leave sentiment online, although nothing implied interference on the same scale as is alleged in the US, but if the rumours are correct, what’s in it for the Kremlin?

Some analysts have implied that Russia prefers Brexit because it believes it will weaken the EU’s bargaining stance when it fronts up to Moscow on matters like the Ukraine. This hypothesis appears believable when looking at a tweet from the mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyahin, who penned that “With Britain, there won’t be anybody in the EU to defend sanctions against us so zealously.”

Michael McFaul a former US ambassador to Russia put the case in similar terms, tweeting that Putin benefits from a weaker Europe and that a UK vote to leave the EU makes the EU weaker, and that it was just that simple, but what about Arron Banks? Separate from the question of social media influence, Arron Banks, the co-founder of Leave. The EU Campaign is currently under investigation by the Electoral Commission.

They’re looking into whether Arron Banks violated campaign finance rules in relation to contributions and loans at the EU election, and the company “Better for the Country Limited” of which Arron Banks is a director is also part of the probe.

The investigation examined whether Arron Banks was the actual source of loans reported by a referendum campaigner in his name and whether “Better for the Country Limited” was the actual source of contributions made to referendum campaigners in its name, or if it was operating as an agent.

The announcement by the Electoral Commission makes no mention of Russia or any Russian participants, and it doesn’t say whether there were any specific third parties being investigated as part of the investigation.

Arron Banks said that the Leave. EU campaign was financed by himself, Peter Hargreaves and the general public, and that his sole relationship with the Russians was a boozy 6-hour lunch with the Ambassador where they drank the place dry.

And in an interview with Arron Banks, he was cited as saying that they had no Russian money into Brexit.

The Remain campaign alleged that the Kremlin was covertly supporting a Brexit to undermine the European Union, and in the former Prime Minister David Cameron, President Vladimir Putin might be happy if Britain left the EU.

So, is the Kremlin leader loving a Brexit?

Mr Putin told journalists the election result brought “positives and negatives”. He talked about the negatives, including the unsettling impact on economic markets, and the United Kingdom and EU have been plunged into financial obscurity.

Every country gets the propaganda it deserves because the lower the aptitude of the people, the more rudimentary the propaganda gets, but now the ruling regimes in the USA and Great Britain have debilitated their victims to such a remarkably absurd degree that it’s virtually impossible to comprehend.

Just a few years ago one wouldn’t have thought that these regimes would actually endeavour to invent something as primitive as this entire parody about Russian interference in elections, yet here we are, but the greater the lie, the more inclined people are to accept it, and that’s the repulsive truth.

Nevertheless, here is history repeating itself and then the Free World again looks up to Russia, hoping that Russia will yet again cure it of another bout of disease, but nobody is that ignorant to imagine that the UK is getting it right, but this isn’t only a UK problem, every country gets the propaganda it deserves and Putin’s Russia warrants plenty.

Former Aide Raped Woman

A former top aide to Tony Blair and John Major is on trial cited of raping a woman while she was asleep.

Mark Adams, 56, worked at No 10 as private secretary to Tony Blair and John Major for a total of six years in the 1990s, and it’s alleged that ex-civil servant Mark Adams raped a woman who was in her 20s, on a sofa bed at his former home in the early hours.

Catherine Farrelly who was prosecuting said that Mark Adams was controlling, and it was claimed the alleged event occurred in Blackheath, South East London which woke the complainant, but Mark Adams told Woolwich Crown Court that he was mystified when she told him at a cafe later that day that he raped her.

The jury then learned that he had bought her the morning after pill, but he denies rape and said that it was what she wanted him to do and move on.

The jury learned that he had two or three whiskies before the alleged rape in the hours following the May 2015 general election, plus a friend said that Mark Adams told her that he had no memory of full intercourse with a woman but he thought they did other things and that she was obliging, so he can remember her being obliging but not having intercourse with her?

The woman actually froze with fear when she awoke to find him raping her on his sofa bed, as Mark Adams pinned her down attempting to shut her up. He further attempted to worm his way out of it by meeting the woman at a cafe the following day, maintaining that he couldn’t remember anything.

The victim said that he got her the morning after pill and made her feel like he was her friend, which made him extremely manipulative, a typical model of a politician.

The victim in her statement that was read in court said that she barely recognised the person she was before and that she remembers the entire thing and constantly has to re-live it in her head.

Since the rape, she has experienced paranoia and has had an alarm fitted in her bedroom, and had an eating disorder, which she had beaten, but has now returned.

Judge Jonathan Mann QC said that the perpetrator did not have the guts to confess to what he had done and lied to the police and did everything he could to undermine the victim.

This brings an end to any aspirations he had in his political profession, and Mark Adams showed no emotion as he was sentenced and convicted, and he will have to sign the Sex Offenders Register for life.

The former Downing Street aide has undergone an exceptional fall from grace after being sentenced for seven years for rape.

The 56-year-old, who was made an OBE in 1997 and was a graduate of Cambridge University denied the rape but was found guilty following a six-day trial.

He took advantage of an especially defenceless woman who had just lost her job and broke up with her boyfriend, and he approached the woman pretending to be a nice man, when in fact he was controlling and mean, even though the offence was opportunistic rather than planned.

It took a jury of five women and seven men to return a unanimous guilty verdict after nine hours and forty-two minutes, and jailing Mark Adams brings an end to his career, which is a misfortune giving his former public service.

He did not use a condom and he prevented her from moving, she was particularly defenceless.

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