Erdogan’s overthrow of freedom

Spiked
In Turkey, the enemies of freedom are winning. Crippling fines are imposed on media that criticise the government, and laws criminalising investigative journalism are used to arrest writers. The end result is the erosion of independent media and a creeping culture of cronyism. A recent report by English PEN, Journalism Under Siege, exposed the gravity of the crisis facing press freedom in Turkey. In 2015, 30 journalists were in prison, and another hundred had been detained in some way. Almost a thousand bans on publications were issued, and more then 42,000 websites were banned."

Terror is the new normal for Germany and France

Spectator
Update: This piece was written yesterday and so is already out of date. This morning two armed men entered a church near Rouen during Mass.  They took the priest, two nuns and a number of congregants hostage. It appears that they slit the priest’s throat before themselves being killed by French security forces.  Nobody can think of any possible motive, though people claiming that attacking Christians at prayer is not a traditional Islamist practice have clearly not paid attention to Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt or any number of other countries around the world."

Brexit – an analysis in the aftermath.

Pointman

As a friend confided to me in one general election, all the people and policies on offer are just different degrees of shit and none of them are the ones he’d go for. For once, the voter had a simple choice between going along with what every organ of the establishment was telling them they should do or waving two fingers at the lot of them. They duly turned out in record numbers to wave their fingers and despite the howls of outrage from the establishment and the rampant hysteria of the media in the aftermath of the results, they’d do exactly the same thing again, only more so if given a second opportunity.

For the last week the mainstream media in conjunction with an outraged establishment, have been hyper-ventilating their way towards an explanation of why such a simple exercise of basic democracy was somehow wrong because it came up with a result they didn’t agree with. ...........

The ongoing Euro crisis and the resultant serfhood for generations of the southern EU states to Brussels was the stumble, the unrestricted flood of shiftless migrants into Europe last year was the trip and Brexit is the fall which I think will break it unless it fundamentally reforms and backs off political union to its originally intended aim of a free market and nothing more – but I think the damage has been done.

All across the EU, the watching member states and their citizens, who’d been assured withdrawal from the EU was impossible, are starting to agitate for their own referendum. The only people responding to that democratic impulse are extremist parties who are gradually gaining political power as discontent seethes because it’s being ignored by the disconnected mainstream parties. They do so at their peril, as the British political establishment have just learnt to their cost.

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of contagion."

Paolo Barnard: THE TRUTH ABOUT BREXIT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9cLwoTkWes

Now a plot to block Brexit: Bitter losers gang up to scupper EU pull-out 17 million voted for

Daily Mail

British and European politicians are plotting to block the UK’s exit from the EU.

On a chaotic day in which the Labour Party went into meltdown, a campaign was started to force a second referendum. Tony Blair, Nicola Sturgeon, some pro-Remain MPs and a senior German official said a rethink was needed now the consequences of quitting the Brussels club were clear.Twenty one Labour frontbenchers have now resigned in a bid to replace Jeremy Corbyn with a pro-EU party leader. The plotters hope a general election can be held later this year before the start of the formal process of quitting. Last Thursday’s referendum could then be reversed. "

.....Mr Duncan Smith said the bid by the political elite to frustrate the will of the people was an ‘anti-democratic joke’. ‘There is a lot of bad losing here from the Europhiles,’ the former Tory leader told the Mail. ‘This was one of the biggest turnouts since the war and there is no justification for a second referendum whatsoever.’ 

 ---------------

ED : This is the elite trying to keep the "little people" in their place....

Brexit: a brilliant revolt against the political class

Spiked Online
So this is what democracy feels like. This is what a ballot-box revolt looks like. Yesterday the people asserted themselves. They made plain their dislike of the EU. And they did so against virtually the entire establishment. The leaders of capitalism, the vast majority of the political class, experts, academics, world leaders, global institutions, the liberal media and the celebrity set united to warn the little people, to hector and lecture them, about the dangers of rejecting the EU. And yet the little people did it anyway. They said No to the EU, and in the process revolted against a political and media establishment that thinks it knows better than us how Britain should be run. This was an uprising, a polite, quiet one, not only against Brussels but against the political class here at home, against those who rule. .......The establishment failed. It stands exposed as utterly disconnected, and morally impotent."

DAILY MAIL COMMENT: If you believe in Britain, vote Leave. Lies, greedy elites and a divided, dying Europe - why we could have a great future outside a broken EU

Daily Mail

Throughout this long and often acrimonious referendum campaign, the most striking fact about the Remainers is that they have failed to articulate a single positive reason for staying in the EU.

Instead, they have subjected voters to a barrage of scaremongering, with the aid of a once proudly independent Civil Service, pinning all their hopes on persuading the British people that the dangers of withdrawing from Brussels outweigh the many drawbacks of belonging to it. In doing so, they have had to seek the support of the likes of Jeremy Corbyn, Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair — from the very party voters rightly rejected at the last election on the grounds that they couldn’t be trusted. "

Labour MP John Mann Comes Out For Brexit

SkyNews
Mr Mann later told Sky News the EU was "fundamentally anti-democratic" and the free movement of people under EU rules means "we can't plan anything".
He said: "If you're a Labour voter, a former Labour voter, a would-be Labour voter, it's perfectly acceptable for you to be voting out, and you'll probably be in the majority of Labour voters, possibly the large majority, in doing so.
"It's because people think that democracy needs to be shifted back to Britain."

Payola for the Hillary?

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)

Even by the standards of arms deals between the United States and Saudi Arabia, this one was enormous. A consortium of American defense contractors led by Boeing would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to the United States’ oil-rich ally in the Middle East.
Israeli officials were agitated, reportedly complaining to the Obama administration that this substantial enhancement to Saudi air power risked disrupting the region’s fragile balance of power…
But now, in late 2011, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was formally clearing the sale… At press conferences in Washington to announce the department’s approval, an assistant secretary of state, Andrew Shapiro, declared that the deal had been “a top priority” for Clinton personally…
These were not the only relationships bridging leaders of the two nations. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia contributed at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, the philanthropic enterprise she has overseen with her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Just two months before the deal was finalized, Boeing ... contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation...

Absolutely incredible. Why isn’t this a scandal? Why are the Democrats allowing Clinton to be their candidate?"

Jeremy Corbyn wants to stay in the EU. What happened to his principles?

Spectator
last week’s featherweight entrants, we were onto some seriously heavyweight fibs this week. In truth there were only two contenders in this week’s EU dishonesty stakes. The first was Jeremy Corbyn’s lacklustre attempt to explain why after a lifetime’s Euroscepticism he is backing ‘Remain’   .........when it came down to it Jeremy Corbyn – just like David Cameron, Theresa May, Sajid Javid et al – decided to put his own political career ahead of his own principles or the interests of his country."

The week in EU deceptions

Spectator
In any case, despite all these shenanigans, nothing this whole week could possibly surpass the vast panoply of porkies which got the week off to its start. The title ‘Fib of the week’ doesn’t really do justice to David Cameron’s appearance on Robert Peston’s ITV show last Sunday. It was a veritable mille feuille of fibbery. "

EU referendum: New figures reveal more than £670 million of EU spending was lost to fraud last year

Telegraph
More than £670 million of EU spending was lost to fraud last year, new figures have revealed.
The false claims were concentrated in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, Olaf, the EU’s anti-fraud office said, as it uncovered €888 million of rogue spending. It is a slight decline from €901 million last year but amounts to a major jump from €284 million in 2012. Four in ten EU officials found to have been implicated in fraud were not punished by their employers and only a handful were dismissed, the report also finds."