Taking Back One's Country

Breathe the Free Air

We will make an educated guess that we'all did not know there was a such a beast as the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance.  Not that we are surprised us to find out that such an animal actually exists: it's just that there are so many committees and commissions in the EU that if you laid out all the members serving on all the regulatory bodies head to tail, face down, in a long row . . . it would be a good start.

If ever there was an occasion to rejoice over the Brexit decision, the EU Commission Against Racism and Intolerance has provided one.

European human rights chiefs have told the British press it must not report when terrorists are Muslim.  The recommendations came as part of a list of 23 meddling demands to Theresa May’s government on how to run the media in an alarming  threat to freedom speech.

The report, drawn up by the Council of Europe's human rights watchdog, blamed the recent increase in hate crimes and racism in the UK on the 'worrying examples of intolerance and hate speech in the newspapers, online and even among politicians', although the research was done before the EU referendum campaign had even begun. [Daily Mail]

This oh-so-holy Committee of Rectitude has ordered the UK Government to forbid the media mentioning that an Islamic terrorist who commits atrocities is a professing Islamic adherent.  To mention such things provokes "hate crimes".

One thinks of King Theoden in Tolkien's Two Towers under the thrall of Wormtongue.  Once released by Gandalf, he is invited to come outside his palace-prison and "breathe the free air" once again.  What a jolt of Red Bull energy must now be running through the veins of the present UK government.  At last they are free to ignore such authoritarian, meddling rulings emanating out of Mordor-like Brussels.
 At last they are free to rule their own people, for the advantage and benefit of their own people.  At last they can consider once more the essential bulwarks of a free society, which include freedom of speech, and a free press.

If ever the UK government needed an ex-post justification for Brexit, there it is.

The suggestions sent to Downing Street urging the UK Government to reform criminal law and freedom of the press and in a brutal criticism of the British press, the report recommends ministers 'give more rigorous training' to journalists.

Yes, you read that rightly.  The UK government is being told that it needs to "train" journalists so that they are thoroughly indoctrinated into Newspeak.  The next paragraph provides a great sense of relief:

But UK ministers firmly rebutted the remarkable demands, telling the body: 'The Government is committed to a free and open press and does not interfere with what the press does and does not publish, as long as the press abides by the law.'

One wonders whether UK government ministers would have been so forthright in their rejection of this example of creeping totalitarianism emanating out of Mordor if the Brexit vote had not been successful.

Britain is already experiencing the beginning of an economic dividend that will come as a result of Brexit.  Contrary to the predictions of global finance firms and the Bank of England, the UK economy is experiencing a nice bounce, now that Britain is beginning to take control of its own affairs again.  No longer will that economy need to bail out Europe's profligate nation-state spenders.  We hope that Britain will go on to experience a freedom dividend as the never-ending slew of rules, regulations, controls, and directives are progressively unpicked and torn up.  Let the people wear ornamental crosses to work once more, if they wish, for example.

Meanwhile the list of nations lining up to negotiate free trade agreements with the UK is growing by the day.  The freedom dividend will be huge, we expect.