I recently completed the reading of Ed Husain’s book, the Islamist. With the recent events in Glasgow and London, terrorism is once again back in the news and as usual talks of ‘prevention’, ‘moderate Islam’ and the like were heard all over the medias.

The book written by a former Islamist, provide a concise yet clear and impassionate picture of what is happening in Britain’s mosques, Islamic societies and even in whole areas of our cities.

The methods used by Islamists groups, involving deception, an abusive use of the ‘moderate Muslims’ etiquette, the appropriations of issues like Palestine, Irak or Bosnia as legitimates causes for jihad, are described in detail. Following the journey of the writer, whose discovery of ‘written Islam’ starts with a book written by a ‘moderate scholar’, in fact a member of numerous organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and whose books are still used as teaching materials or children; which then gradually becomes a fully committed Islamist. Everybody who has dealt with Muslims associations controlled by such groups will recognise their tactics, of aggressive heckling, the use of propaganda on the lines of ‘Palestine today, Britain tomorrow’ and the use of ‘doctrinal destruction’ against any group perceived as ‘not enough Muslim’ (read too moderate). Their use of our own laws on freedom of speech against us, linking any refusal to racism and their own links with far left parties such as RESPECT are exposed in daylight.

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It’s now over a week since the dust settled and two new Labour MPs took their seats in the House of Commons. As many had initially predicted, Labour won both Ealing Southall and Sedgefield by a comfortable margin.

In Ealing Southall, Labour were a full five thousand votes ahead of the Liberal Democrats and seven thousand ahead of Tony Lit, with ‘David Cameron’s Conservative’ gaining about half the votes Labour polled. There has been an enormous amount of spinning on these two elections from all sides, however, make no mistake, the result in Ealing and Sedgefield were not good for the Conservatives – though it has to be said they were hardly good for Lib Dems or Labour either.

Like many others, I was extremely disappointed that the Conservatives didn’t do much better in either Ealing or Sedgefield than at the 2005 General Election. Tony Lit, who had only weeks before donated around £5,000 to the Labour party while head of Sunrise radio was not the type of candidate we should have been selecting to fight the seat in Ealing, and far too much hype was added to the campaign.

I do not believe in faceless opportunism and winning at any cost, though of course, in the end Tony Lit only exhibited faceless opportunism because he didn’t win. Also I can’t say I was happy that Mr Lit was installed by Cameron against the wishes of the local association and without any real consultation, even though Tony Lit had only been a party member for a few days. I suspect this is in part because the Conservative upper-echelons and general hierarchy care little for the grassroots and supporters, and in fact at times treat them with complete contempt (the new MEP Selection process comes to mind.) What’s more, what exactly is ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’? I thought I belonged to a political party not a strange suedo-personality cult like ‘Alex Salmond’s Scottish National Party’. Thankfully, though I never involved myself in any active campaigning during the Ealing Comedy, so I have a clear conscious on that part.

In fact, I think I can say that I am actually rather glad Tony Lit did not win in Ealing Southall. Of course, the downside to this was that Labour did win and have installed yet another socialist posing as a ‘moderate’ in the Commons, similar to the ex-Communist Piara Khabra, who preceded him. However, many of the voters of Ealing Southall, whether wittingly or unwittingly, rejected the spin and opportunistic ways of Tony Lit. Therefore, at the next election the Conservatives have an opportunity of selecting a real conservative to fight the seat, not some opportunistic chancer who fancied the idea of being an MP.

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Yesterday, the Government announced that unclaimed money from ‘abandoned’ British bank accounts will be used to fund the building of ‘a youth centre in every town’.

The Government’s reasoning is that if they create a large number of very expensive youth centres, teenage thugs and ruffians will just suddenly stop causing trouble and enjoy using the new facilities instead.

Apparently many youths go out and cause ‘trouble’ (government speak for getting drunk, beating up other people, causing criminal damage to property, etc) because they have nothing to do. It’s not their fault you see. The fact that there are many other children who have ‘nothing’ to do and yet do not go around breaching the law does not seem to register as applicable to a government and a Labour party that just loves to waste your money on pointless and ineffective schemes.

But that is not really what this post is about. This post is about how the Government are attempting to legalise the theft of private money so that they can waste it on further unnecessary state projects, and unfortunately, this plan has been on the cards for sometime. With most British pension plans already pillaged and with government borrowing and taxation at unprecedented levels, Gordon Brown has been forced to pursue new ways of raising money for yet more unnecessary and wasteful government spending.

Currently the plan is to allow the Government to claim any money in any UK bank account, so long as it has remained dormant for fifteen years. Apparently there is £15bn of such money is stashed away in UK bank accounts. However, what individuals do with their own money is up to them. If they wish to keep money in an account for fifteen years or more, then that is their right. The Government should not be able to take an individual’s money whether they wish to make use of it or not. In the event that a person dies and leaves money in an account, then the bank should make efforts to trace the relatives of that person’s family and they should receive the money.

The government has plenty of other nasty ways of taking money which they have no right to – inheritance tax being a perfect example. Legalised theft from private accounts should not be another way.

The DfT recently published its transport strategy for the next 30 years in a tone quite similar to a similar strategy launched by John Prescott in 1999 for the next ten years, whose results were non-existent to say the least.

Rail is as expected at the heart of this strategy, calling for a 13% increase in capacity by 2014, when forecasts for the same period anticipates at least 20% of increase in passengers numbers. This single sentence already says everything, but wait there is more.

As most of newspapers already announced, commuters will bear the brunt of the planned ‘service improvements’, railway fares in Britain are already the most expensive in Europe, yet they are set to increase even more. Carbon emissions are also at the heart the agenda as one might imagine and while it perfectly possible to reduces the carbon footprint of railways even more, the ‘solutions’ proposed by the DfT bureaucrats are very optimistic at best. When cars are still not running on hydrogen, it seems possible for them to have trains running on hydrogen, biofuel is also mentioned, when in fact biofuel engines costs more to maintain than classical diesel engines. As far as capacity increases are concerned, there are mentions of a ‘new signalling system allowing a 50% increase in train paths’, the last time the government talked about installing a new signalling system on the network, the price was a few billions for almost nothing as a result.

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Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, was interviewed yesterday by ITV News and asked why he would not resign over revelations that the BBC had actively deceived the public in faked competition phone-ins.

His response stated that he would not be standing down because he wished to help re-establish the BBC’s code of conduct throughout the whole corporation, and that he had the full confidence of the BBC Board in this undertaking.

Where have we heard something similar to this before? Ah yes, that’s right, it’s exactly the same type of response elicited from Labour Ministers Charles Clarke and John Reid after successive Home Office scandals. They created or had a hand in the scandal and then claimed to be the solution to fix it. How convenient.

Well, it didn’t work out in the end for either Charles Clarke or John Reid, and I hope that it doesn’t for Mark Thompson either. However, if Thompson goes, the BBC Board will only bring in another equally inadept individual who won’t do anything but persist with the biased status quo of a corporation who continue to take the license fee far too much for granted, and with little regard for those who pay it.

Mark Thompson said that the BBC’s latest problem was down to only a small number of individual staff who did not take fairness, integrity and honesty to heart. But, in reality the BBC itself is the problem – not just any one part of it. The whole corporation is an unaccountable and uncontrollable mess, and until it is abolished or privatised the problems will only grow.

Gordon Brown told the House of Commons today that the Government would research and look carefully at the reclassification of Cannabis from a Class C drug to Class B. In other words, they might reclassify; they might not.

However, regardless of whether Cannabis is classified as Class B or C is largely irrelevant. More often than not, drugs laws are not enforced at a low or personal level. Individual users are rarely prosecuted, if ever, and it is only large scale importers and distributors or dealers that are sporadically targeted.

Celebrity addicts such as Kate Moss and Pete Doherty regularly flout the law without any consequence, other than the minor inconvenience of a court appearance which invariably leads to nothing. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that Pete Doherty is now better known for his drug abuse than his music. Such behaviour and lack of any retribution sends out completely the wrong signals about drug use to ordinary people who read about it in the media.

The use of illegal drugs needs to actually be enforced by the police - though unfortunately this seems unlikely in the foreseeable future since most of our political classes and the liberal media probably have used or continue to use these substances themselves, and so have little or no interest in discouraging their misuse.

Labour’s announcement is nothing more than another meaningless gesture that will do nothing to actually solve the growing drugs problem in Britain.

The occasion of Gordon Brown becoming Prime Minister has been used by numerous commentators, either at home or abroad in order for some to praise Tony Blair’s legacy and for others in order to minimise it.

The former were unfortunately I may add more vocal than the later. Abroad things are even worse. Some continental medias are openly using the opportunity to brags about ‘Britain’s longest period of economic growth’, by at the same time highlighting ‘the corrections made to the damages caused by Thatcherism’.

Yet the real picture has numerous differences, with the one pictured by these commentators. If Britain was able to record its longest period of economic growth, it is mainly thanks to the reforms made by Margaret Thatcher and, by the often forgotten John Major. While it is fair to say that some mistakes were made during Thatcher’s years, Britain’s industries were already in decline by 1979 courtesy of Labour support to Arthur Scargill and, after ten years in power, the legacy of the Labour Party on social matters is nonexistent to say the least. True ‘billions were invested in order to catch up with other nations’ as people like Anthony Giddens like to say in the French newspaper Le Figaro. Yet the education system is falling apart, the NHS is even more bureaucratic than before and, Britain’s transport system is unable to meet the need of the future decades.

More than the failure of Blair’s legacy this also highlights another failure, the utter failure of the ‘Third Way model’ in Britain.

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