In the mean time I’ve been keeping tabs on the whole ‘Climategate’ saga which thankfully blew up a few months ago before the Copenhagen Climate talks. Much of the foot work was done by the blogs both in this country and in the United States as the mainstream media sort to bury their heads in the sands and managed to turn a collective blind eye.

Today has seen heavy snowfall right across the country causing disruption to traffic networks and business. However, predictably the usual suspects have been quick to claim that what is predicted to be the coldest winter in thirty years is not, in any way whatsoever, in conflict with man-made global warming.

If you haven’t read it already, Dr Richard North wrote an excellent article for the Mail on Sunday about how the Met Office has been so wrong about its long term forecasts. I am also about to start reading Christopher Booker’s latest tome on the subject of Global Warming and Climate Change which comes highly recommended.

As I write, it is beginning to snow again, so I leave you with a photograph of all that Global Warming in my garden this morning. Clearly I had absolutely nothing better to do…

For having the audacity to stand up for her beliefs and probably those of millions more then she has come under intense and personal criticism from the Left – and for this at least she deserves acknowledgement.

Yet, I do find her rather annoying. Despite her brave, if at times ignorant, stand on traditionalist issues such as abortion, at times she lacks a sense of credibility. Perhaps the attacks by the Left really are hitting home, or perhaps it is because when she gets things wrong it is arguably in spectacular fashion. Who knows?

On her blog last night, Ms Dorries did nothing at all to alleviate these concerns of mine. Quite openly she cited ‘rumours’ from a close yet unnamed source who suggested that the MPs expenses scandal may have been created and exploited by the apparently ‘fiercely eurosceptic’ Barclay Brothers, who have since 2004 been the multi-billionaire owners of the Telegraph newspaper group.

Nadine went on to declare that she agreed with her source who said the Barclay Brothers wish to destabilise Parliament and allow anti-EU parties to gain votes at the European elections because the Conservative Party are not ‘eurosceptic’ enough. Yet, if she really believed the Barclay Brothers were conspiring against MPs then she should have said so rather than using weasel words.

What’s more, the recent MP allowances scandal is collectively the responsibility of all Members of Parliament. Nobody forced MPs to claim their allowance in full. So when Labour MP, Stephen Pound, claimed that Parliamentary staff ‘used to ring people and say you’re under claiming this month’, and that, ‘in reality they were helping us over the cliff’, this was still absolutely no excuse.

Furthermore, of course the Conservative Party is not eurosceptic enough – but then, these days, euroscepticism doesn’t mean anything anymore anyway. You either leave the EU or remain in it and run by it – there is no in between. However, whether that is the view of the Barclay Brothers is debatable. They have never done much to give me the impression they favour EU withdrawal.

However, there is indeed deception at work, and like Ms Dorries I do not find it particularly unlikely that:

This is all a power game … the British public are being worked like puppets by two very powerful men. Whipped up into a frenzy to achieve exactly what they want.

As I did previously remark, something similar happened in 1997 when the media collectively grouped together to help remove the Conservative administration under John Major. Something similar is beginning to happen again, the result of which will mean that important political issues won’t be discussed (or even aired) and as a consequence no honest political choice will be given to the electorate come the General Election next year.

Despite Cameron and the Conservative Party being equally guilty and complicit in the recent expenses scandal (manufactured or otherwise), the media has sought to portray the Conservative Party as setting the agenda on Parliamentary expenses (which it has not done). This is so that the furore may be used as a mechanism to allow the Conservatives back into office without proper scrutiny of their policies or those of Government.

We are entering very dangerous territory and our entire British political system faces an enormous challenge. Under the cover of darkness that this scandal has cast across Westminster and engulfed the media, our Government, with the willing compliance of the opposition, are seeking to force through yet further radical constitutional reform. Melanie Phillips in the Spectator argues:

The last thing that should happen is for Parliament to be made even weaker. Yet MPs are apparently themselves doing just that by agreeing to have their financial arrangements removed from Parliamentary control and given to an outside body. But this undermines a key principle of our Parliamentary democracy that Parliament is sovereign and no-one tells it what to do.

As Dr Richard North had previously remarked – this scandal is a symptom, not the cause of our wider problem. That problem is the constitutional crisis we are now facing which has been mainly brought about by successive Governments and Parliaments who have helped to whittle away our democratic powers and right to self-government. The result has been a public left bewildered and angered by handsome perks for MPs who are not doing their job.

In this way, Nadine Dorries redeemed herself this morning when she rightly remarked that the real fault lies with successive Governments and their Prime Ministers, who have never had the courage publicly to address the issue of MPs’ salaries and their worth. The currently proposed reforms will go no way towards assessing that worth either. One or two MPs might ceremonially be thrown under the bus by their leaders to save the rest, but, fundamentally, nothing much will change at all.

We cannot continue to blithely ignore the overriding issue of sovereignty. Unless our Parliament as an institution is rebuilt and strengthened against the power of Government then it shall remain meaningless and verbose, and these types of financial and political scandal will only perpetuate.

While both scandals undoubtedly serve to remind us and the electorate of how out of touch the political class are with the rest of the country – both morally and politically – this cannot, I think, necessarily be seen as entirely desirable.

In the few years leading up to the 1997 General Election, the Conservative Government of John Major was engulfed in scandal after scandal involving the sleazy activities of Tory backbenchers and Ministers. The bedroom antics and financial misdoings of MPs whom nobody had heard of previously were suddenly splashed all over the front pages of the daily newspapers.

It would be fair to say that all Governments who have been in office for any considerable length of time are susceptible to these scandals. This does not, of course, make it right that they should have been carried out by the individuals in question, but simply to say that such human and political failings will almost certainly happen under any Government of any party given enough time.

As it happens, the supposedly ‘whiter than white’ Labour party that followed the Conservative implosion and electoral landslide of 1997 was swiftly involved in its own set of financial and sexual scandals, with Robin Cook choosing to sack his wife at the airport after a phone call with Blair and later marrying his mistress, while Peter Mandelson was caught up in the Hinduja passport row.

Yet, with a change of Government, very little by comparison was made of these similar scandals in the mainstream media, and sleaze suddenly became politically unimportant again (to most journalists at least). This therefore suggests that sleaze only seems to matter when a Government is perceived to be doing a bad job. This was the case in the mid-nineties under John Major and is equally so now under the tenure of Gordon Brown.

However, more importantly, the cry of sleaze levelled at individual MPs and Governments can be used by the media as a means by which to allow the political opposition into office without ever having subjected them to reasoned or thorough scrutiny of policy.

In short it is an unreasoned, mindless frenzy. It happened in 1997 with very little public scrutiny of Labour’s policies under the leadership of Tony Blair, and it appears that something similar is happening again with the Labour Government and our Tory opposition under David Cameron. The effect will be that ‘real’ political issues will not be discussed (or often even aired) and that as a consequence no honest political choice will be given to the electorate – they will simply be voting on personalities.

Labour backbencher, John McDonnell, and Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague, call for a swift inquiry into the email leaks and those responsible for the digital comments. The end of the world as we know it beckons.

Who actually cares? Certainly not me, though it seems that the usual suspects in the media and in the blogosphere have worked themselves up into a mad feeding frenzy over what amounts to be nothing more than a complete non-issue.

Nobody living outside the Westminster bubble actually cares at all either. Real people with real jobs and families are either too busy dealing with their own financial problems, as our economy falls into the worst recession for decades, or worrying about more important issues from health to immigration. Perhaps this is why the British National party are rapidly gaining traction in local elections at the expense of all the main parties?

In fact, this whole rather sad episode played out in Westminster just goes to further highlight how completely out of touch our political class have become. They’ve made more fuss over a few pathetic emails than they have over many, many other issues which are actually important to the electorate. This will only serve to drive yet more voters into the arms of the racist BNP.

I do not condone Den Dover’s clearly deceitful and illegal actions but I think that the issue of his personal theft from the system in comparison to EU waste in general is very minor.

However, with our modern media being what they are you can guess which story they will spend most column inches discussing.

Could it be that the old left-wing fanatic is afraid of losing her seat at the next election, which she currently holds with only a slim majority of around two thousand votes?

Whatever the true reason for her departure, good riddance I say. Unfortunately however, the damage she helped cause in her time as Education Secretary under Tony Blair’s premiership will not be undone by her political demise.

Ruth Kelly, like so many of her Ministerial predecessors across the decades, presided over the imposition of increasingly pitiful state education on the poorest in Britain while, as emerged earlier this year, allowing her own children to escape the system by sending them to good public schools. Of course, afraid of the public backlash that her hypocrisy would have sparked, she desperately attempted to suppress the truth before the story broke.

Unsurprisingly, Ms Kelly’s arrogant and hypocritical stance is not unique within the Labour party. Diane Abbott famously described her own decision to send her child to a public school despite being against them and for the hopeless state educational system in this country as, ‘indefensible’.

Even before the final result was announced, numerous European politicians including José Manuel Barroso had made plain that the Lisbon Treaty was not dead and that ratification in all member states must continue.

Thus the Irish will discover in time that within the European Union there is no such thing as real choice. Either you subjugate yourself to the will of the Brussels bureaucracy or leave – and since all political parties in Ireland are in favour of remaining within the Union, in much the same way they were all in favour of the EU Constitution, then it is almost guaranteed that the Lisbon Treaty will be forced upon the Irish people eventually.

Some people still talk of creating a looser European Union of independent trading nations. They fail to realise that if the EU and its politicians are prepared to ignore the will of the French, Dutch and Irish voters in very specific referendums, then it is entirely unlikely they will suddenly feel the need to allow members to simply trade freely without any political baggage.

The EU is irreversibly set on the course of ever closer political union. Its elites will not listen to the people, whom they secretly despite for democratically voicing their doubts, and will plough on regardless – even in the face of popular adversity. How does anyone continue to believe that is democratic or favourable?

Richard North continued the story by pointing out that the affect of amending these parliamentary rules will probably be to prevent David Cameron from forming a new eurosceptic group as he had pledged during his party leadership campaign and breaking away from the EPP-ED.

Gawain Towler also talks us through the procedure of how the vote came to pass and the way in which Europhile Tory MEP, Timothy Kirkhope helped Labour’s Richard Corbett escape defeat. Whether this was intentional on Mr Kirkhope’s part is open to debate – though he had ample motivation since he has been against Cameron’s pledge to leave the EPP-ED from the start.

Rather sadly, a significant number of people in politics and the media (who probably should know much better) continue to have a fairly rose-tinted view of what they would like the European Union to be, rather than acknowledge what it has actually become. Despite all evidence to the contrary they persist in believing the Union to be a free trading area when it is not; a bastion of democratic ideals when it is not, and a co-operative but loose association of sovereign nations when it is not.

The sole aim of the EU’s fore-fathers and subsequent torch bearers always has and always will be ‘ever closer union’ and political integration. As a consequence EU institutions and supporters will not tolerate any dissent against their grand project which they have spent so much time and effort slowly constructing, and will often break their own rules of procedure simply to evade any semblance of democratic opposition.

To an ever increasing extent, even outside the chambers of the European Parliament, the EU has purged any form of meaningful euroscepticism. Beyond small pockets of resistance, the majority of big businesses, politicians and the European mainstream media are in favour of the EU project and ever closer union.

Furthermore, the European Union effectively prevents eurosceptic parties from contesting elections to any significant degree. Anti-EU parties such as UK Independence (UKIP) are just about tolerated when contesting national elections because they have no chance of actually winning or forming a government. Therefore they can be portrayed by the EU and the media as marginal and extremist, despite the fact that they are not. Yet, as soon as a party or a campaign group appears even partially capable of winning on an anti-EU ticket then the EU invests its full political and financial weight to intervene so that such an outcome becomes far more unlikely.

Those that doubt this is the case need only take a look at the current Referendum campaign in Ireland on the Lisbon Treaty where the EU Commission has purposefully curbed any unpopular announcements until after the result has been announced and has helped to massively funded the ‘yes’ vote. Head of the EU Commission, José Manuel Barroso recently issued a veiled warning to the Irish by saying:

If there was a ‘No’ in Ireland or in another country, it would have a very negative effect for the EU. We will all pay a price for it, Ireland included, if this is not done in a proper way.

The ‘proper way’ of course meaning that the Irish need to vote for the Lisbon Treaty or they will suffer the consequences of being asked again, and again until it is done in the ‘proper way’. As I have said before, the European Union does not understand the word ‘no’. It’s not in its vocabulary. If ‘no’ does mean anything at all to the EU, it is that it is a deferred ‘yes’.

Returning again to the issue of the European Parliament voting to ban eurosceptics from forming opposition groups; those calling for the amendment claim that it is necessary to change the minimum grouping size to prevent single issue groups from gaining undue taxpayer funding. However, if you start to make it more difficult for political parties to form groupings because you disagree with their opinions then you enter dangerous waters.

For David Cameron this represents a key test of his leadership. His commitment to take Conservative MEPs out of the EPP-ED grouping was a very specific pledge during his leadership campaign, and a great number of people voted for him based on this one issue. As Richard North points out, this provides:

The litmus test of his Eurosceptic credentials and thus assumes an importance which transcends the actual issue.

If Cameron falters at the final hurdle and does not leave the EPP then there will undoubtedly be ramifications and he is going to make a lot of people very unhappy. Let us hope he does not fail.