• With world markets in turmoil and gold and silver tremendously volatile, today King World News interviewed former LBMA commodities broker and trader and current MEP Nigel Farage to get his take on the situation.
Asked what is happening with the Eurozone crisis, Farage responded, “Paralysis, I think that’s the only way one can describe it. They put together a currency, an economic and monetary union of countries that were entirely unsuited to each other. The idea that Greece and Germany could coexist under the same monetary framework was always a joke as far as I was concerned.”
• The EU Council of Ministers has just agreed to guarantee the loans of the European Investment Bank's external operations to the tune of €30 billion, Agence Europe reported today (no link). This could cost British taxpayers another billion pounds, according to UKIP MEP John Bufton. "I am amazed that the UK Government would agree to this measure, which means underwriting the European Investment Bank to the tune of €30 billion," Mr Bufton said.
"This could cost the UK an easy £1 billion, which in our economic situation is just madness.
"Given that we have already just given £21 billion to the IMF and have a collossal Foreign Aid budget of £7.7 billion, we must question the Coalition's commitment to protecting the interests of the British taxpayer.
"What we need is trade not aid for foreign countries, otherwise it just encourages dependency and government corruption."
• A major carbon accounting flaw in EU legislation will have "immense" consequences for the environment, concludes a report published last week by the top EU advisory body, the Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency.
The flaw concerns biofuels used in transport, and biomass used for power generation, which are erroneously counted as having ‘zero emissions’.
Responding to the report, UKIP Enviromental spokesman Stuart Agnew MEPsaid:
"This report forcefully exposes the great weakness in the case for biofuels, i.e., that to produce sufficient quantities of energy, large areas of land must be used to grow bio-fuel crops, leading to less space for consumable, agricultural output and, as happened a few years ago, spiraling costs for basic food stuffs across the globe. The quicker that Britain and the EU drop all the loopy green dogma, most of which is without scientific foundation, the better.
“In the real world, wheat prices are up and there is an increasing shortage of grain. Diverting agricultural land to bio-energy is literally taking food out of people’s mouths.”
• Two German professors will be joining UKIP Leader Nigel Farage for a conference in the European Parliament in Brussels, 12 October 2011.
The conference and debate, titled 'Preparing for Euro Breakup', will be introduced by Nigel Farage, co-president of the Europe of Freedom and Democracy group (EFD), which is sponsoring the event.
Professor Wilhelm Hankel, who last year led the challenge to the euro bailouts in the German Constitutional Court, will tackle the first topic: "Currency Union or Foreign Exchange Rate Union?" He is followed by Professor Philipp Bagus, who will address the "Practical steps to withdrawing from the Euro." (See bios below.)
VIDEO • Speaking today in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, UKIP Leader Nigel Farage told Commission President Barroso and MEPs what European Economic Governance is:
"It's a plane landing at Athens airport out of which get an official from the Commission, an official from the ECB and an official from the appalling IMF. And those three people - the Troika you call them - go in, they meet the Greek Government and they tell the Greek Government what they may of may not do. You have killed democracy in Greece. You have three part-time overseas dictators that now tell the Greek people what they can and can't do."
"I have one last plea Mr Barroso," Mr Farage said in conclusion. "Will you please help Greece. Help her to get her currency back, help her to reschedule her debts, help her to get out of the mess you have put her into. Your policies have failed. Stand up, be a man, admit it."
• The European Parliament voted today on a Motion of Resolution about the DOHA negotiations.
Speaking in the Plenary chamber during the debate on Monday, UKIP MEP William Dartmouth said that these WTO negotiations can only be successful if there is wholesale CAP reform, something that is being prevented by the majority of MEPs.
"The European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is equivalent to about $80 billion per year. This huge subsidy is a distorting factor in world food markets. It erodes the fair operation of the market in food, generates export dumping and damages the ability of farmers in the developing world to earn a living.
"It is nation states and not EU agencies which should control and patrol national borders. Frontex is an affront to British freedom. This latest move is simply a power grab by the EU to give Frontex more money, personnel and powers. This vote gives the wrong powers to the wrong people."
Speaking in the Chamber of the European Parliament in Strasbourg this morning, Mr Batten, UKIP MEP for London added:
"It seeks to change the legal basis on which Frontex operates and give them more so-called competences. It will for example give Frontex the ability to co-operate with third party countries on behalf of the EU.
"This proposal is another way of increasing the power and dominion of the European Union over its member states."
"We are being led by a group of college kids, with no experience of the real world and who always put their careers first.” - Nigel Farage
• UKIP's 2011 Annual Conference proved a smash hit with record numbers turning out for the Eastbourne event.
Leader Nigel Farage took the opportunity of his keynote speech to more than 800 delegates to outline the Party's proposal for an English Parliament in a fresh new look at devolution.
Under the new plan, England would have a First Minister and executive which would be responsible for domestic legislation such as education, health, the environment and transport.
Meanwhile, a slate of international speakers went down a storm among the Party faithful.
“The European Union has decided to waste £2.65 million of taxpayers money investigating the nutritional benefits of eating insects.
“These wastrel bureaucrats must have spent far too much time watching ‘I’m a celebrity – get me out of here’,” said local UKIP MEP Paul Nuttall.
“Roasted scorpions and pan-fried locusts might be great if you are starving and have no choice. But for heaven’s sake civilisation has actually moved on from a Stone Age diet.”
“I think it's scary just how much time the European Commission spends dreaming up nonsense ideas to waste taxpayers’ money.
There’s a real world out there that needs real answers not mental meanderings,” said Mr Nuttall, UKIP’s Deputy Party Leader.
• Speaking immediately after the German Federal Constitutional Court rejected a challenge to block eurozone bailouts on the grounds that they were illegal, UKIP leader, Nigel Farage MEP said today:
"This judgement now puts the German government on a collision course with the German taxpayer and I believe will lead to an increase in Eurosceptic sentiment in the country.
"The German people, like many in Northern Europe, are getting very tired of their tax money bailing out other states.
"The court today tightened up the law and demanded that in the future the German Federal government is obliged to obtain Budget Committee approval prior to giving any guarantees which is a useful development.
"The Maastricht Treaty is clear that no bailouts are permissible and IMF Chief Lagarde has admitted that the treaties were broken and the EU acted illegally."
• Newly released figures showing that the number of British builders fell by nearly 60,000 last year as foreigners flooded the industry make depressing reading, said UKIP MEP Paul Nuttall today.
“These figures from the Office for National Statistics are another snapshot of what we already knew, there are too many immigrants taking jobs that British workmen should be doing.
“It seems almost every day more statistics are released which demonstrate how badly the UK is being affected by immigration.
“Unless we withdraw from the European Union, the immigration spiral will continue and more and more jobs, and not just in construction, will be taken by immigrants.
• UKIP leader Nigel Farage with the Croatian foreign affairs and EU integration state secretary, Andrej Plenkovic, during a debate on Croatian Accession at the conference centre of the Croatian Journalists' Association, Zagreb, on Monday 5th September 2011.
The debate, organised by e-academia, also featured Dr Anthony Coughlan, senior lecturer emeritus at Trinity College, Dublin, as well as nationally known figures from the Croatian political spectrum.
In what turned out to be a vigorous debate, the issues of farm subsidies, loss of political sovereignty, the effect of free movement of people caused by the Schengen Agreement and other aspects of EU membership were discussed.
• The announcement to make compulsory redundancies in our armed forces are unbelievable given that our armed forces are stretched to almost breaking point fighting two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This is being done in the name of cost cutting but there are great many cuts in other areas that should be made first - for example the £15 billion per annum contribution to the EU budget, billions in overseas aid to countries like India and Pakistan that have their own atomic bombs and space programmes, and benefit payments to foreign nationals. Let's cut those first.
After five years on the European Parliament's Defence and Security Committee I can tell you that these cuts are part of a deliberate plan to reduce British armed forces so that they can no longer be viable in their own right and then merged into a 'European Defence Identity' - i.e. the EU's own armed forces.
"It is no surprise that those countries in the EU who have the fastest falling unemployment rates are those with Flat fair taxes. Look at Estonia (17.9% to 12.8% between the second quarters of 2010 and 2011), Latvia (19.9% to 16.2%) and Lithuania (18.2% to 15.6%) and you can see the efficacy of their taxation schemes,” said Mr Bloom.
"A flat, fair tax rate allows businesses to plan and significantly reduces their compliance costs. It allows them to hire with confidence which in turn leads them to be able to employ more people.
• The EU Commission is pushing for a trade and fisheries deal with Morocco that "would exploit the natural resources and ignore the rights of the people of Western Sahara", UKIP MEP William Dartmouth has said.
Speaking after a debate at the Fisheries Committee today, he added: "The EU wants to trash the fishing grounds of the Western Sahara just as they have trashed those of the South West. This is completely unacceptable."
A member of the international trade committee, MEP Dartmouth called for a rejection of the trade deal.
"This trade deal is so bad that the legal service of the European Parliament has described it as 'a violation of the permanent sovereignty of the people of Western Sahara over their natural resources' as well as being contrary to International Law," Dartmouth adde
"It is disgusting that the EU is trashing the fishing grounds of Western Sahara. I am shocked that the UK Government would consent to this formal EU fisheries agreement. This is all very grubby indeed."
• Members of the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee met yesterday in an extraordinary meeting to discuss the sovereign debt crisis with the President of the ECB, Jean-Claude Trichet and Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, Olli Rehn, amongst others.
The meeting took place as news emerged that Angela Merkel’s coalition was in crisis as she no longer had enough votes to secure backing to her and Sarkozy’s Eurozone ‘rescue’ plan. Merkel’s Bavarian sister party the CSU have rebutted the Franco-German plans and said that EMU countries in crisis should be allowed to default.
I asked Mr Trichet to face the music and allow default. I told him that markets look to countries in trouble, but they also look to the reaction of the stronger countries in the Eurozone. Take Germany and France: In Germany discontent is spreading.
UKIP • The latest immigration figures from the Office of National Statistics prove the Government has no grasp of the issue, says UKIP Home Affairs spokesman Gerard Batten.
"The rise of 21% in year on year net immigration figures tears a gaping hole in any pretence that this Government has the faintest idea of how to deal with runaway migration," he said.
"This gives a lie to all those silky promises made by Cameron at the time of the general election and the thousands of sound bites by Government ministers since then. They have lost the plot.
"The figures released by the Office of National Statistics show that net migration to the UK rose from 198,000 to 239,000.
"What this means is that the population of a city the size of Stoke on Trent has arrived in the UK in the last year alone.
"These headline net figures also disguise an even more concerning trend, and that is the transfer of population made clear by the gross figures which show that over half a million, more than the population of Sheffield, have arrived in the last year, while 336,000 have left. The social impacts of this are even greater than the bald figures make clear.
UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom slams the RDR [Retail Distribution Review] as scandalous and predicts a "financial armaggedon" over confluence of EU and UK regulation. He is interviewed by Cara Waters from FTAdviser
•Godfrey Bloom, UK Independence Party MEP for Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire, was in typically robust form as he discussed the prospects of the financial services sector, predicting a "financial armageddon" stemming from problems in the eurozone and the imposition of the RDR.
Mr Bloom, member of the European Parliament's Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, said: "Just at the time when people are desperate for financial advice, the government is dismantling the United Kingdom's system of financial advice which is utterly scandalous.
"I have written to the Financial Services Authority, I have written to Hector Sants, I have written to Mark Hoban - I have written to anybody and everybody.
"Why is it for politicians to suggest how you should be remunerated as a financial adviser, how can that be the responsibility of the politicians?
"If I choose to pay for advice this is my own judgement, it is not for politicians to decide. In a free society we should not have government's imposing these decisions on us."
The MEP has campaigned vociferously against the RDR and has previously posed parliamentary questions and made an appeal to the Human Rights Committee, which was rejected. However, he claimed he will not give up the fight.
• The phrase two-speed Europe has been bandied about in recent weeks, and it seems even the most optimistic commentators have started to pluck their heads from the sand and brandish claims that fiscal and federal union is the only thing that could save the Euro.
For a long time, people like me have claimed that you simply cannot have a common currency without the homogenisation of economies, harmonising taxation and spending and thus surrendering a great deal of sovereignty. That is why it is vital the UK never joined the Euro, and it is why the currency has suffered so significantly in the global financial crisis.
Yet when we were saying this even just a year ago, we were labelled doom mongers, trying to scare the public that the EU was more ambitious than it really was, that no one was trying to undermine domestic power and there is no need to force the Eurozone to club together and become more than just an economic bloc, but in all respects other than name, a federal superstate. Now everyone is proclaiming how it is essential these moves are made, as if they too had been stating the obvious for years and were also jeering at the Commission everytime another bail out was awarded which would have as much efficacy as trying to bail out a sinking ship with a thimble.
Now, all of a sudden, the two Eurozone powerhouses, France and Germany, in the wake of the portent of economic federalisation, called an urgent meeting to establish a Eurozone government.
• Job prospects for the young are being damaged by the constant refrain from the political and cultural elite about how bad British workers are, and how good migrant workers are, said UKIP Deputy Leader Paul Nuttall MEP, August 23.
“I have lost count of the times that senior British politicians and commentators have gone on about how dismal British workers are in comparison to marvellous migrant workers, particularly from Eastern Europe.”
“It has become a self-fulfilling prophesy and is undermining the attempts of millions of young people to find work.”
A report has been released by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development/KPMG – The Labour Market Outlook – which shows that employers are now even less keen to employ British workers, but are desperate for migrant workers.
“This comes on the back of figures released last week that in the past year 181,000 jobs were created in the UK, but 237,000 jobs went to migrants,” said Mr Nuttall, Euro-MP for the North West.
“According to the report employers dislike British workers so much that they are switching from non-EU to EU migrants rather than face the prospect of employing locally. This must end.
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UK Independence Party in the European Parliament, Europe of Freedom and Democracy group, Rue Wiertz, 60 - 1047 Brussels
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By Gerard Batten MEP
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UKIP
UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom slams the RDR [Retail Distribution Review] as scandalous and predicts a "financial armaggedon" over confluence of EU and UK regulation. He is interviewed by Cara Waters from 
By John Bufton 
