Unfortunately though, the rapid demise of Europe’s anti democratic Union has been predicted on many an occasion and, so far at least, failed to materialise. Therefore one now tends to make such predictions with some level of care.

Consequently, I shall, for the time being, pass over the continuing Euro zone crisis and instead briefly comment on the current violence in London – a city that long ago ceased to be English or British.

The death of Mark Duggan in Tottenham on Thursday, who was shot by police during what the BBC describes as ‘an apparent exchange of fire’, is another unpleasant reminder of the failure of our criminal justice system and our increasingly destructive political class.

As our police force have evolved into another department of social services, and its officers have receded from their once prominent position on the streets of our town and cities, the criminal elements in society have become increasingly emboldened.

On the orders of wise politicians, the police have become a reactive service rather than remain a preventative force – and they ceased long ago to be citizens in uniform, instead seeing each other as an elite group, draped in paramilitary equipment and riding around in expensive metal boxes, all utterly removed from the events outside and the people they are tasked with defending.

Far from deterring crime, they appear – if at all – only once the offence has taken place, sometimes to record the transgression, but usually to provide counselling and lecture the public against ‘taking the law into their own hands’. Yet attempt to engage in a political demonstration and suddenly the riot shields come out in force.

But most worrying of all is how the police have slowly been armed over the course of four decades, with the inevitable outcome being violence and bloodshed. It was the abolition of the death penalty in the 1950s to 60s which created the present situation. The fear and deterrent of the noose quickly gave way, and as the figures starkly prove, gun crime has rapidly risen in the years since.

Areas of London and other major British cities have become no-go zones, ruled by armed gangs who kill without mercy or so much as a thought for the consequences. While the police have retreated to the safety of their police stations and squad cars, when the two gun toting groups eventually cross paths and lock horns, the deaths of innocent bystanders are the inevitable outcome.

This really is only the beginning. Unless we restore the deterrent of the death penalty, gun crime will continue to rise without check, as will unintentional death at the trigger finger of the police. Either it is criminals who live in fear of the law and justice, or we who live in fear of criminals. Which is it to be?

It was never my newspaper of choice, being rather light on actual news and rather heavy on the kind of moronic celebrity gossip designed to keep the plebs occupied rather than focused on anything meaningful or important.

Yet, it is highly unlikely that The News of the World will disappear all together, with News International PLC almost certainly planning to re-launch the paper under a different brand. Furthermore, the same journalists working at The News of the World will simply transfer across to the new paper or indeed another paper – so nothing much or substantial will have changed in that regard beyond the image.

However, the fate of The News of the World is not actually the really important matter, but instead the manner of its downfall and what was subsequently brought to light (and I am not referring to the alleged phone hacking – which is rather unimportant and a matter for the police and the courts).

The so-called phone hacking scandal is firstly an absolutely classic example of Westminster-village journalism, and illustrates just how the news corporations make the news and set the public agenda to the exclusion of much more important stories and events outside of the political classes’ bubble. As Richard North observed, did our MPs ever demand an emergency debate over the banking crisis, or more recently the Euro zone and debt crisis in Greece, as they have over phone hacking? The answer is, of course, er, no…

Predictably, the Labour Party (full of brain-dead morons like Chris Bryant) have obsessively attacked the Murdoch paper over phone-hacking, in part as revenge for the paper’s favouring of the Tories at the General Election, and in part because it directly affected them – nothing vexes the political class more than an attack on their own bank balances, privacy or privileges. But when they spy on us, force us to carry ever more draconian forms of identity, tax us into oblivion and destroy our lives, economy and society, then that’s absolutely fine – no problems. End of. Anyway, more importantly, as Autonomous Mind notes:

The phone hacking scandal, while criminal and disgusting, is nothing more than a rider for a campaign where something far greater is at stake – maintaining the left-liberal media consensus that holds sway in this country…

Unsurprisingly, the efforts of the BBC and the Guardian in exposing News of the World misdoings coincide handily with the decision-making process of the Culture Secretary on whether to allow News Corp to buy the sixty one per cent of shares in BSkyB that it does not already own. Thus, the real agenda is not focused on phone hacking but the potential future make up of the broadcast news.

While I do not share Autonomous Mind’s view that Rupert Murdoch is especially conservative or has intentions in that direction with his pursuit of the BSkyB deal, then I think he’s spot on to highlight the widespread coverage of the issue as being induced by the liberal-left media’s fear of competition for control of the airwaves and digital arena. The argument goes that if the image of News Corp and its entities can be sufficiently tarnished, then the Culture Secretary may come under significant political pressure to snub the takeover, thus safeguarding the liberal broadcast monopoly.

Only then does it become clear as to why the media have expended so much time and effort into bringing the phone hacking to the fore. Vested interests and bread and circuses once again rear their head.

Like so many before him, Peter predictably called for the legalisation of all banned narcotic substances by the State arguing, in classic ‘harm reduction’ style, that what British people really need, rather criminalisation, is ‘better drugs education on how to take them safely and where to get help if needs be’.

Where do I start? There are so many comments and observations by Peter in his piece that I take issue with that it is difficult to know where to begin. I suppose, firstly, it should be made clear that even if we, as a nation, wanted to legalise such substances then we could not due to the binding international treaties which Britain has signed. Before we could begin to initiate legalisation in this country, Britain would have to break from these treaties.

Anyway, putting aside the fascinating issue of international law for the moment, it should also be said that North Jnr doesn’t get off to a fantastic start in his article when he says of drugs that:

The evidence that prohibition is a failed policy mounts up year after year but we remain in a constant state of political paralysis.

I would have thought that it really goes without saying that the banning of drugs such as cannabis and heroin in Britain are not in the slightest like prohibition. However, much like the pressure group, Transform, whose spokesman was given a rather soft interview by Evan Davis on the BBC’s Today programme recently, Peter North seems convinced that the British state somehow acts in a ‘punitive, prohibitionist’ way towards illegal drugs.

Rather than explain this point myself I will directly quote Peter Hitchens from his most recent Mail on Sunday column because he rather handily sums up this false analogy far better than I could:

If only our policies were actually punitive. But drug use and possession are almost entirely unpunished, which is why they carry on growing.

As for ‘prohibition’, the drug lobby uses this expression to mislead the gullible into comparing the winnable struggle against narcotics with the doomed war against booze fought by the ‘Untouchables’ and others in Twenties Chicago.

Alcohol had been legal for centuries, part of the culture of Christian civilisation. You might as well try to make breathing illegal. But cannabis, cocaine and heroin are alien to our world, and could be driven out by firm action.

Actually, US Prohibition recognised that the cause was lost before it began. Congress never made it illegal to drink or keep alcohol, only to sell, transport or make it. Our most important drug laws are utterly unlike Prohibition because they rightly ban possession.

And if our cowardly courts and bureaucratic police would only enforce the existing law, we would see a swift decline in the use of illegal drugs.

They don’t, because our establishment – including the BBC – was itself introduced to drugs in the Sixties and still cannot see why they are wrong.

Despite increasingly frequently assertions from the likes of North Jnr and so many others that Britain has lost the so-called ‘war on drugs’, the fact of the matter is that in reality we’ve never fought one. Instead successive Governments have simply undermined their own laws, demoralised the police and made quite sure that the rules were not enforced, with the intended consequence being the practical legalisation of narcotics by stealth.

Peter North’s assertion that these drugs should be made legal is therefore practically irrelevant. They might as well be considered legal at the moment since prosecution for use is rare, especially among the rich and famous. Even if you are stupid enough to be caught and sentenced by a court of law then the punishment often amounts to nothing more than a smack on wrist.

North Jnr also continues to make the assertion throughout his article that people are going to take drugs anyway, so why bother to stop them? Returning to the aforementioned theme of ‘harm reduction’, again Peter Hitchens was spot on when he said:

Virtually everyone else in the official drug policy establishment is a member of the same faction – the one that believes the best approach to drugs is ‘harm reduction’, that rejects any moral objection to self-stupefaction, or the idea that by disapproval and punishment we could reduce the amount of drug-taking and the number of drug takers.

On the contrary, they work on the basis that drug abuse is more or less inevitable and so must be managed by advice (much as the ‘sex education’ zealots work on the assumption that the young will have sex below the age of consent and without any thought for the consequences, whatever we do or say, and so the only thing we can do is pelt them with condoms and morning-after pills). Doesn’t it occur to them that the adoption of this attitude by Professors and Police officers might actually make drug taking more likely?

Quite so – and I really don’t have much more to add to that particular line of argument except to say that taking the attitude of ‘harm reduction’ is not in the least bit conservative.

It has been duly noted, in the past, that North Jnr likes to lecture people on what is ‘real conservativism’. I suppose I am not really one to talk here since I do a similar sort of thing all the time too. Everyone has an opinion on what conservativism is and means, but it is fair to say that certain stances are more conservative than others – and some not even conservative at all.

Furthermore, very early on in his article we get an indication of why Peter North takes this attitude and just what he thinks of drugs, by way of his observation that ‘people take drugs because, for starters, they’re great’. Later on in the article he readily admits to having taking them in the past, describing them as ‘fun’ and, rather bizarrely, as ‘educational’.

This I think feeds into another important point about the debate on drugs policy – one which I have made before – which is that the majority of the time it is self-serving drug users (or supposedly former users – one never quite knows whether they are being honest about having given up or not) who are calling for their activities to be legalised to suit their own selfish pleasures and needs, even if it means that thousands of other people may in future be condemned to harm and misery.

I have yet to actually meet someone who has not once taken these drugs and yet still wants to legalise them. Perhaps this is because I have not spoken to enough people yet, but it certainly seems to be the case that the vast majority of those advocating legalisation are doing so with wholly selfish intentions.

This is perhaps a little strange because North Jnr accurately describes the way in which such drugs can lead to enormous problems for society as well as the families and friends of users. Yet, he then goes on to make ridiculous statements such as this:

If you had to obtain recreational narcotics from a chemist and there’s a special queue for them with all the other junkies, kids will see that what they’re doing is seriously uncool.

Is he serious? Apparently so. Anyway, and finally, a question that never seems to be have been answered by the pro-legalisation advocates is what exactly would we lose by driving the use of these substances from our society completely?

Moving on from the legality of certain drugs, North Jnr does make a number of good observations about the increasing retreat of the British political system from policies to personalities. However, in one paragraph he writes of politicians that:

They’re afraid of public debate, they’re afraid of real politics and that’s why we get things like ‘constitutional reform’.

While it is certainly true that, in general, many politicians are increasingly scared of public debate and formulating policies, I think it is a mistake by Peter to underestimate the Left and the power and significance they place on ‘constitutional reform’.

Firstly, how exactly can ‘constitutional reform’ not be considered to be ‘real politics’? Okay, so at face value ‘constitutional reform’ may not seem to be important in directly tackling issues such as immigration or economic problems, but its undertaking certainly doesn’t mean that those politicians and parties that pursue it are not interested in politics, real or otherwise.

The many radical and important constitutional changes that have been enacted by New Labour since 1997, under Blair and Brown, have been seen by them as vitally important in achieving their long term goals, whilst undermining traditions and institutions such as the Monarchy for their social and political ends.

Having said that, I think North Jnr is generally right in his analysis that the Government, whether it be Conservative or Labour, is on a countdown to extinction, and that British people are simply waiting for parties and politics of substance to return at Westminster. Let us all hope that such a day, if it ever arrives, comes sooner rather than later.

This merely points out the true inevitability of the situation – that the future of Royal Mail is in ‘privatisation’. It does not matter what we think about this; whether we agree or disagree with ‘privatisation’, it is not up to us to decide any longer – and it has not been our decision for quite some time.

As I previously highlighted, the European Union Postal Services Directive 2008/6/EC, which amended the previous Postal Service Directive 97/67/EC has decreed that ‘privatisation’ will indeed occur. Furthermore, as Directive 2008/6/EC clearly states:

Member States shall bring into force the laws, regulations and administrative provisions necessary to comply with this Directive by 31 December 2010 at the latest. They shall forthwith inform the Commission thereof.

Therefore the ‘privatisation’ of Royal Mail from its position as majority universal service provider must occur by 2011. In targeting April for a sell-off, our Labour administration is simply doing as it is being told by our EU masters in the Commission rather than following the advice of any policy groups or reports.

I should also point out that even if the Conservative party were against the ‘privatisation’ of Royal Mail (which they are not), then it wouldn’t make the blindest bit of difference. Our continued membership of the European Union confers upon us the necessity of obeying its legislation which is now part of our own law.

Now, what I have found particularly interesting about the whole Damian Green saga (which I think has been completely blown out of all proportion by our typically hopeless media) is the outcry from the likes of Nick Clegg and an assortment of Liberal Democrat, Labour Party MPs.

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg told the BBC in an interview that he was deeply shocked by the arrest of Mr Green and claimed the event was a ‘mayday warning’ for democracy in Britain, saying:

This is something you might expect from a tin-pot dictatorship, not in a modern democracy.

The fact is though, like so many of our MPs that aimlessly waft around in Parliament, Nick Clegg only becomes interested in ‘democracy’ when the safety of the increasingly irrelevant Westminster bubble is punctured.

What do the likes of Nick Clegg really know of democracy? Where were he and others when our powers of self-government and democracy were being given away to the EU? Oh yes, that’s right, they were there in Parliament voting to give it away.

Bearing the above in mind, the speed with which our MPs of all parties have rallied to one another’s side and in the process ignored the real issue of our increasingly non-existent democracy betrays the truth that in fact MPs from all parties often have more in common with each other than they do the voting electorate.

Most people should have realised by now that many of our right honourable members are prone to corruption and breaking the laws they themselves created, especially with regard to party funding.

I explained back in December why this is really not as important an issue as it will be made out to be. Yet, unfortunately and without really surprising anyone, the British mainstream media will be on full alert tomorrow, ready to cram their papers full of pointless discussion and analysis on this non-event until everyone is completely sick and tired of the whole issue.

This will undoubtedly be at the expense of highlighting far more important issues such as a certain EU Constitution making its way through Parliament at the moment – though having said that, the British media were unlikely to have discussed that anyway – but there is even less chance of it happening now.

In August, the EU Commission sent a message to the Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, strongly urging him to abolish the death penalty in his state and cease all future executions of those on death row.

The Commission’s note stated that, ‘There is no evidence to suggest that the use of the death penalty serves as a deterrent against violent crime and the irreversibility of the punishment means that miscarriages of justice, which are inevitable in all legal systems, cannot be redressed.’

Apart from there being plenty of evidence to suggest that the death sentence acts as a very good deterrent of violent crime and murder, what exactly has the legal process and laws of a self-governing state such as Texas got to do with the European Union? Not much is the answer.

As it happens, Governor Rick Perry put the Commission in their place with a brilliant response saying that, ‘230 years ago our forefathers fought a war to throw off the yoke of a European monarch and gain the freedom of self-determination. Texans long ago decided that the death penalty is a just and appropriate punishment for the most horrible crimes committed against our citizens. While we respect our friends in Europe, welcome their investment in our state and appreciate their interest in our laws, Texans are doing just fine governing Texas’.

In Texas citizens can elect politicians to abolish the death penalty if they so chose, but in stark contrast, if the subjugated people of Europe wish to elect politicians to reinstate its use, then they are not allowed to do so as it would directly contravene sacred EU law.

Despite their previous unsuccessful foray into external politics, yesterday, EU Commissioner, Markos Kyprianou, called for China to immediately ban tobacco advertising in time for the Shanghai Formula 1 Grand Prix. This is apparently because although European Union laws on tobacco advertising do not apply in China, images of the cigarette logos on F1 cars will be broadcast on TVs back in ‘European’ homes which, as Mr Kyprianou told China’s Vice Health Minister, ‘In a way undermines and limits the effectiveness of our own legislation in protecting citizens, especially young people, from this kind of tobacco marketing.’

As an unelected and unaccountable Commissioner, Markos Kyprianou will probably have felt right at home in undemocratic Communist China – but that is still no reason for his and the EU Commission’s self-righteous interference. If I were the Chinese, I’d just tell Markos and the EU to fuck right off.

How prophetic. He was completely correct in his observation – except for the year. I think he must actually have been describing our current Labour Government with their torrent of legislation criminalising the ordinary person, attempts to spy on us night and day with compulsory identity cards, and monitoring us with secret organisations such as SOCA.