William Shepherd

It may not be long before the Militant Imams turn their minds to the idea of attacking the Global Killingry Industry by redeploying their British Followers from killing and maiming innocent air travellers. Perhaps they have already done so. There have been some very strange goings-on at Deepcut Barracks near Camberley in Surrey.

The latest episode in the saga of four young recruits has been the Report of Nicholas Blake QC which raised more questions than it answers. James Collinson, Sean Benton, Cheryl James and Geoff Gray may have been bullied but it seems unlikely all four committed suicide. So why is the Government so anxious to avoid a Public Enquiry? These inquiries do not necessarily provide any answers but they allow the airing of some alternative hypotheses…such as assassins from outside the Army Base firing the fatal shots while the soldiers were on sentry duty.

Every two years global corporations gather in London’s Docklands to show their wares at the Defence Systems & Equipment International Arms Fair. The Mayor of the Borough and the Mayor of London may object but to no avail. What ever happened to Local Byelaws? The English Taxpayer would object about the £4 million the Metropolitan Police budgeted…and the 4 000 officers they reallocated from War on Terror activities...but is never informed.

The United Nations defines a major war as a military conflict leading to a thousand battlefield deaths per year. On this measure there were 15 wars in 2003…up from 10 in 1965. Each year about half a million people are killed globally by armed violence.

In the First World War one death in twenty was a Civilian Death but now three quarters are civilian deaths. 2004 was a landmark year in the Global Killingry Game with World Military Expenditure exceeding a trillion dollars for the first time. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council were responsible for 88% of reported conventional arms exports. Every £1 of Development Aid squeezed out of Brown’s Treasury is matched by £8 of arms export licences. The US ratio is worse…$1 of Aid to $25 of Killingry.

3% of the UK’s manufacturing output and a workforce of 350 000 is devoted to Killingry which generated $ 4700 million of export sales in 2003…well behind the USA with $ 13648 million but ahead of Russia ($3400 million), Ukraine ($1500 million), France and Germany ($1200 million each) and China and Israel ($400 million each). The Blair-Brown Government is in the Top Ten Importers of Military Hardware…most of it from the United States.

Here are the 1998 to 2002 figures (all figures are millions): 1. China $ 8818 million (Russia 93%); 2. Taiwan $ 6822 (USA 71%); 3. India $ 4824 (81% Russia); 4. Turkey $ 4688 (60% USA); 5. Saudi Arabia $ 4360 (66% USA); 6. Greece $ 3958 (47% USA) 7. South Korea $ 3445 (64% USA); 8. Egypt $ 3251 (91% USA); 9. UK $ 3 116 (82% USA) and Israel $ 3 033 (74% USA). And here are the Licensed UK Arms Exports in 2004: 1. US £ 210 million; 2. Italy £120; 3. Saudi Arabia £ 100; 4. Oman £ 90; 5. Germany £ 90; 6. South Africa £ 90; 7. India £ 80; 8. France £ 70; 9. Turkey £ 60; 10. Romania £ 60.

Gordon Brown’s Revenue & Customs Regulations take up a couple of feet of shelf space. A few of the many thousands of instructions are the rules for Controlled Foreign Corporations which the Chancellor of the Exchequer uses to loot foreign subsidiaries of English Companies. Soon after these rules were introduced a long queue of Trans-National Corporations formed outside the European Court claiming that Brown’s Rules violated their right to establish a business anywhere in the European Community and take advantage of favourable tax regimes.

Last week the Court ruled in the companies’ favour. Brown can only apply the rules to wholly artificial companies with no real economic activity like a ‘letterbox' or 'front' company. And he can’t appeal. The decision has been hailed as a victory against Brown’s aggressive efforts to prevent the movement of profits to lower tax countries. In its ruling the court said that Britain's CFC Legislation was a restriction on the freedom of establishment guaranteed by European Treaties. Oh that Tax Avoidance were the only sin of Our Corporate Masters!

Ken Livingston was trained as a teacher but entered politics at an early age. After a successful coup in 1982 he took over the leadership of the Labour Group on the Greater London Council. Margaret Thatcher was so horrified that in 1986 she abolished his parliament and sold off County Hall…a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament…to a Japanese Hotel Consortium. The Sun liked to refer to him as ‘the most obnoxious man in Britain’.

Red Ken won the nomination to be the Labour Party MP for Brent one of the largest constituencies in London. Then in 2000 despite…or because of…being disowned by Labour Party’s apparatchiks and thrown out of the Labour Party he became Mayor of London...effectively for the second time. The Sun is right. He is an old-style Socialist.

Hugo Chávez served in the military for seventeen years before his failed coup in 1992 put him in a Venezuelan jail for two years. An admirer of Fidel Castro his election to the Presidency of Venezuela in 1999 sent alarm bells ringing in Washington.

Over in Outer Darkness amidst the Moral Majority, the TV Evangelist and Right-wing Republican Pat Robertson suggested that the CIA should ‘take out’ Senor Chávez after his well-publicised remarks that ‘Capitalism leads us straight to hell’ and ‘The USA brought 9/11 on itself with its imperial foreign policy’. These are hardly newsworthy utterances in a South American context. But then Venezuela has oil…and the USA has an Oil Addiction.

Our Socialist London Mayor believes that western foreign policy is responsible for breeding Islamic Terrorism. He is also on record as saying that ‘worldwide capitalism kills more people every day than Hitler did’…qualified of late with the remark ‘and he was crazy’ to avoid inflaming the Holocaust Defence League.

The thing that really got Margaret Thatcher's goat was Red Ken’s insistence that London needed to talk to the IRA because the IRA were bombing the place. Twenty years later he has taken the logic of this statement one stage further by exploring the idea of Direct Barter between London and Venezuela. And it looks like he may have got himself a deal with Venezuela supplying diesel to London’s 8000 buses at 40% below market price...and BP or Shell responsible for delivery.

Earlier this week a two-page memo was leaked from the London Mayor’s Office with some suggestions about the favours Londoners might trade in return for their cheap Venezuelan oil. It makes for interesting reading. Top of the list is access to London’s CCTV and Genetic Fingerprinting expertise. Other ideas are how to operate a city’s security and public order systems operate; how to integrate and manage overground traffic; how to route buses; how to limit carbon dioxide emissions and how to develop adult education programmes. Click here to read the Venezuelan President's reply.

Meanwhile across the Irish Sea, out in the country and down on the farm Policymakers have discovered that Irish Agriculture accounts for 29% of Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions…and that half of this emerges from the front and back ends of the animals which give us Irish Beef and Kerrygold Butter.

Methane is twenty times as lethal as Carbon Dioxide in Global Warming Theology. One country where this is very stale news is New Zealand which discovered some years back that its thirty million sheep and ten million cows were giving off thirty seven million tons of methane a year…more than any other part of the economy. How was it to meet it’s Kyoto Commitments?

A Flatulence Tax on the country’s sheep, cows and deer is the answer New Zealand’s Labour Government has come up with. You couldn’t make it up. The idea was not to persuade the dumb beasts to hold back their wind but to delude the dumber politicians that the £14 million a year raised by the tax would be used to subsidise research into ways of getting the animals to give off rather less of the noxious gas sometime in the future.

The nationwide guffaw of incredulity was soon followed by a roar of protest from New Zealand’s 130 000 farmers who launched a Fight Against Ridiculous Tax…FART…campaign.

Polls showed that only 12% of the population were green enough to think the Fart Tax was anything other than a bad joke. On behalf of the 84% opposed to the tax, farmers blocked the streets of Wellington the capital with 200 tractors. One Member of Parliament even drove a tractor up the steps of the parliament building in protest…and earned himself a bossy reprimand on health and safety grounds from the country’s Prime Minister Helen Clark for his pains. A local newspaper gave out free baked beans to the demonstrators so they could make up for all the cows and sheep which could not be resent.

Up until now New Zealand’s farmers were best known for the fact that alone in the developed world they receive no Government Subsidies. Since these were abolished agriculture has become the fastest growing sector of the economy. New Zealand’s farmers are now so efficient they can transport their lamb and butter half way round the world to Britain and still compete on price with their lavishly-subsidised European Union counterparts.

But terrified that their country might get the reputation of being a bastion of the free market New Zealand’s politically correct Labour Party Ministers seem determined to make their country the laughing stock of the farming world. At least Ireland hasn’t announced plans to do the same…yet.

But the really terrifying thought is that when the Department for Environment Farming and Rural Affairs works out that Britain has even more sheep and cattle than either of these countries the English might be commanded to save the planet by following New Zealand’s example.