12/09/2008
For some strange reason, although the Lisbon TGreaty (the renamed superstate constitution)was passed by Parliament, and given
Royal Consent , it was not officially
ratified until the signed document was lodged
with the Italian Foreign Ministry in Rome. It is
sad to report the dirty deed is now done and the
documents arrived in a diplomatic bag in Rome
on Wednesday 16th July 2008.
It’s quite simple how the giveaway of our independence starts in different areas, it even almost sounds
reasonable, but as with everything the EU does
there is always an ulterior motive - namely the creation
of a country called Europe.
Although the EU already has a police
force in the secretive and shadowy shape of Europol,
it also, as warned by Torquil Dick Erickson, has an
embryonic militarised gendarmerie too. Now, it obviously
wants a recognisable pan-EU uniformed police
force too, and what better way to start it off than
by allowing police officers from all across the EU to
operate in different EU countries.
During July, news
was released that the EU wants to set up police stations
in tourist areas manned by police officers from
the various nations.
In the not too distant EU plotted future we
could have French, Italian, German and other police
officers operating in police stations in London, Bath
and other tourist areas. The idea, according to the
French interior minister Michele Alliot-Marie, is to
put multilingual police in tourist areas to win back
disillusioned voters to the EU - although a referendum
would have been better.
HOW THE EXPRESSION, “IN OLD MONEY”, PUTS YOU IN YOUR PLACE
BY DEREK NORMAN
Derek Norman: going metric has
cost billions of pounds.
Ever since the traitor Prime Minister, Ted Heath, lied
through his teeth when he said, “There will be no
loss of essential national sovereignty”, when referring
to British membership of the
Common Market/European Economic
Community in 1972, there has
been a relentless ratcheting of interference
in virtually every aspect of
Britain’s, heritage, culture, and traditions
by the un-elected European Union
Commission and the army of
over-paid bureaucrats in Brussels that
we are all paying for. Note: Employees
of the EU get special privileges in
the form of high salaries, generous
pensions and very low tax rates that
are not available to ordinary British
citizens.
Now that the 30-year secrecy
files are available to the public
we know that high-ranking civil servants
in various government departments
warned Cabinet Ministers that it
would be very difficult to force metrication
on the British people, especially house-wives
and the elderly.
The process of metrication would
have to be introduced slowly over a long period of
time with various sections of industry, commerce,
and education being informed when it was time for
them to go fully metric.
The Civil Service informed
the Government that there was a general desire by
some industries, such as the Building Industry to go
metric. This is only partially true because it was the
powerful bosses rather than the workers or the British
people who really wanted the change. Some
bosses made exaggerated claims about the feeling of
industry and commerce generally being sympathetic
or actually desiring to go metric.
Of course, during
the 1960s various government ministers pushed for
a change-over to metric to gain favour for British
entry into Europe despite over a hundred and fifty
years of Britain leading the Industrial Revolution
and becoming, up to that time, the world’s greatest
trader and exporter. The British system of weights
and measures prevailed on about a third of the Earth
and the 1000th-of-an-inch had become the industry
standard for engineering.
Going metric has cost this country many
billions of pounds and many thousand of jobs. I
have seen high quality machine tools such as lathes,
boring machines, multi-ton presses, bending machines
and many other industrial machines in good
working order, ripped from their bases and sold for
scrap, when their real value was perhaps 100 or 1000
time more than their scrap value.
I saw these wonders
of British engineering being thrown on the
scrap heap for no other reason than that they were
calibrated in British traditional units of feet, inches,
and 1000th of inches and often replaced by inferior
and expensive metric machine tools. We have seen
hard-working men and women market traders taken
to court and given criminal records for selling fruit
and vegetables in pounds and ounces because the
EU imposed Metrication Directives on the British
Government that forced the traders to sell their
goods in grams and kilograms.
The traders were
forced to buy new metric scales that cost between
£500 and £2000 when their imperial
scales were still in perfect condition.
Petrol Stations and Garages
were forced to replace their petrol
pumps that delivered in gallons, with
pumps that delivered in litres.
If you can imagine the cost
of all the petrol pumps in the United
Kingdom being replaced at between
£5000 to £10,000 a time you can
probably make a reasonable guess
that we are talking big, big, money.
I have not yet mentioned all the
manufacturing and production
equipment that has had to be
changed to metric, all the labels,
specifications, operating instructions,
building regulations, shipbuilding
construction measurements and a
multitude of other areas where metrication
has cost the British taxpayers
dear.
I often phone the BBC or ITV weather
forecasters to complain that all polls taken in the last
twenty years show that the British people still prefer
traditional British units when considering, depth of
snow, distance of visibility in fog, or air pressure
readings on a barometer, etc. A good proportion of
the population, including the elderly still prefer temperatures
to be given in Fahrenheit rather than
Celsius/Centigrade. The Met Office, the BBC and
the Independent TV Companies will not even consider
giving the British people an imperial and fahrenheit
forecast just once or twice a day.
Since the BBC especially has to work to its
charter of providing for all the people, I find it offensive
that the Director and Chairman of the BBC
ignore the wishes of so many of its listeners and
viewers. One lady weather forecaster said to me;
“We have gone metric and you will have to accept
it”. Well pardon me! The Government has gone
metric, but the British people have definitely not.
The metric system is the system of force and punishment,
whereas the imperial system is the British
peoples’ favoured system of democratic choice. So
next time you hear a Weather Forecaster, News
Reader or Presenter say “The temperature in Old
Money is xx degrees fahrenheit” or “The air pressure
reading on your barometer in old money is xx
inches” you know that behind that remark is a personal
sneer at the 70% to 80% of British people that
still prefer their own traditional system of weights
and measures.
Just think what the UK could have
done with all the billions of pounds wasted on trying
to force the unpopular metric system on the British
people in terms of hospital services, help for the elderly
or improving public transport? What about
having a Golden Mile in the 2012 Olympic Games?
After all, we’re paying for it!
Derek Norman is the Chairman of Active
Resistance to Metrication.
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