Divide And Rule

News has finally and officially broken that the Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome, Samuel Coates has accepted a job in David Cameron’s office as part of his speechwriting team.

Some websites have been wishing Sam Coates well, and I suppose for me not to do so would seem somewhat mean-hearted considering what a golden political opportunity this is for him. So, very well done and congratulations to you Sam – best of luck in your new position.

I remember once meeting Sam outside the Highcliffe hotel on the cliffs of Bournemouth at the Conservative Party Conference in 2006. The poor boy was standing by the garden gate handing out some expensively produced 18 Vanity (Doughty) Street adverts to those leaving that day’s conference proceedings.

I spoke to him for about ten minutes or so and thought he seemed like a decent enough chap – but then most of the people in this party do until you really get to know them. I have also been pretty certain for some time now that Sam would eventually move on from ConservativeHome to pastures new because he had been in a position to build up a long list of contacts.

However, one does have to express more than a little scepticism at the decision by Cameron’s office to bring young Sam into the inner fold. Taking nothing away from Sam who is I’m sure a fine upstanding young man with all the qualities a speechwriter requires, the motivation behind this is actually, I think, a classic case of divide and rule by David Cameron – a tactic of which Tony Blair and the Labour party have in the past been very fond.

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The Freedom By-Election

Not all that much of a surprise was the re-election of David Davis as MP for Haltemprice and Howden in the by-election held on Thursday.

As had been predicted, Mr Davis comfortably won the poll by some fifteen thousand votes against an assortment of twenty seven candidates that conspicuously lacked any representation from the Labour party.

During the early hours and days of his resignation, Mr Davis stirred up quite a media and public storm. Across the country Conservative Associations received phone calls from members of the public telling of their support for David Davis and the issues of freedom despite never having voted Conservative.

However, come the day of the vote and result, the ever fickle media’s interest had worn away and very little was made of the result – which I suppose in part is unsurprising given that Mr Davis received no challenge from a Labour party candidate over the issues of freedom surrounding detention without charge.

As I commented previously, I suspect that David Cameron would have rather preferred to back the Government’s plans on detention without charge if he’d had the opportunity. However, I think it was very much down to David Davis’ actions that the Conservative party has now publicly pledged to do away with the legislation if it forms the next Westminster administration.

A Dedicated Border Police Force

The Conservative Party, which for some reason The Telegraph now refers to as ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’, have announced possible plans for a new dedicated Border Police Force.

The new unit will apparently help combat illegal immigration, people and drugs trafficking along with a whole host of other niceties that cross our borders on a day to day basis. However, as is unfortunately the case with so many new Conservative proposals, this mooted Border Force will avoid the true issue and instead tackle an irrelevant one.

The immigration problems that we now face as a country have little to do with the illegal variety which constitutes only a very minor part of our total immigration burden. In fact our real problems (and they are many) lie with what is entirely legal immigration over which we no longer have any say or control.

When we became members of the European Economic Community and later the European Union we accepted the text of the Treaty of Rome which grants the ‘fundamental right’ of free movement to Citizens of the Union across member state borders.

This supposed ‘right’ to free movement was later strengthened by our old friend Directive 2004/38/EC and more recently the Lisbon Treaty (aka. The Constitution) which has now completed its rubberstamping journey through our increasingly irrelevant provincial council (aka. The Houses of Parliament) and will soon come into force once the will of the Irish people has been circumnavigated (aka. basically told to shove it).

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It Must Be Global Warming

No Ice At The North Pole screams another typical front page headline from the left-wing newspaper, The Independent this morning.

According to The Independent, the article is apparently ‘an exclusive’ – but truth be told, it is not. In fact the story came to light more than eight years ago in the United States and has cropped up in the global and national media more than a few times since.

Back in August of 2000, The New York Times printed a similar but equally erroneous report suggesting that ‘the North Pole is melting’. Yet, the Times were forced to issue a retraction after it was pointed out by other scientists that in the summertime open stretches of water in the Arctic were a normal occurrence.

Thus, the US-based Capitalist Magazine observed less than a year after the New York Times article:

Objective science reporting has become a casualty of the Kyoto crusade. Last August, for example, the New York Times hastened its slide from respected news source to leftist propaganda rag, by screaming from its front page that ‘The North Pole is melting’.

The story was based, not on scientific data or even computer models, but on the claims of a single scientist – an apparatchik in the UN global warming bureaucracy – who attended a summertime tourist cruise to the North Pole on a Russian icebreaker. The tourists arrived at the pole, the Times breathlessly reported, and saw open water. ‘The last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water’, the reporter declared, ‘was more than 50 million years ago’.

Real scientists reminded the Times that stretches of open water in the Arctic are a normal summertime event, caused by shifts in the ice, and the paper was forced to publish an embarrassing retraction.

However, the eco-left were not content to let the story lie forgotten and managed to revive it again in April this year with ABC News claiming that the ‘North Pole Could Be Ice Free in 2008’. Today, eight years after the original claim and two months after its latest appearance in ABC, The Independent has just caught up and republished the falsehood.

What’s more, the Independent article fails to even mention the volcanic eruptions that have very recently been discovered by scientists under the arctic icecap. But then why would The Independent worry about such trivial matters as truth, fact and good journalistic standards and practices? They are convinced that Global Warming is almost solely caused by the activities of humanity and will publish any evidence, whether true or not, to persuade others that they are correct.