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The recent shenanigans carried out by Extinction Rebellion over a fortnight in and around central London marked the nadir of British politics as heretofore understood and practised.

Waving placards,demonstrating en masse and venting vacuous platitudes on any matter is of course de facto guaranteed by our unwritten constitution.Largely because any given demonstration by itself doesn't herald much if any of a change in government policy or challenge any set of accepted legal norms.

Unless,that is we have a government in meltdown and we're in the midst of an unprecedented fully blown crisis of constitutional legitimacy.Which we are.

Up pop a mysteriously funded,fully formed campaigning organisation capable of launching a planned,co-ordinated two weeks long disruption of daily London life and traffic flows. An eco-millenarian cult that has metastasized across the european continent and has its own High Priestess/Delphic Oracle in Greta Thunberg.

In the face of this largely gentrified,professional middle class mob espousing veganism,population eugenics and gluing themselves to train carriages and Ministry entrance doors,the Metropolitan Police in collusion with the Home Office nakedly surrendered and were manifestly brazen about their cowardly dereliction of duty to maintain and enforce the Law and public order and safety.

Barely two weeks after this eco-millenarian cult withdrew,the following  headlines sprouted up, a further clarion call for capitulation to the Vegan AlQaeda.

Scotland declares ‘climate emergency’ following school strikes

The Independent

19 hours ago

'Climate emergency' declared by Welsh Government

BBC

9 hours ago

 

Labour to force Commons vote on declaring environmental and climate emergency

The Independent

2 days ago

 

Whilst the Pravda of Greens,LibDems and Labour - The Guardian just blatantly made it all up as they usually do:-

 

Two-thirds of Britons agree planet is in a climate emergency.

 

 

The lunatics are indeed in charge of the asylum.

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Confused ? You will be..

(This gleaned from  Wikipedia)

The United Kingdom's component of the 2019 European Parliament election is due to be held on Thursday 23 May 2019. Initially, the elections were not planned as the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union (following the 2016 referendum) was set for 29 March 2019. However, the British government and the European Council agreed to delay Brexit at the European summit on 11 April. While it is the default position in UK and EU law for the election to take place, the UK Government is continuing attempts to avoid participation by agreeing withdrawal before 23 May.

and what precisely is this "parliament " allowed to do?

Article 14 of the Lisbon Treaty describes the functions of the European Parliament:

 “The European Parliament shall, jointly with the Council, exercise legislative and budgetary functions. It shall exercise functions of political control and consultation as laid down in the Treaties. It shall elect the President of the Commission.”

(Consolidated versions of the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, 2010)

While the legislative powers of the European Parliament are discussed in the following subsection, its other main powers are then:

Budgetary: together with the Council of Ministers, the Parliament agrees on the budget.

• The Commission drafts the budget and in April each year sends it to the Council of Ministers and the Parliament
• The Parliament debates it and, if needed, proposes changes. The draft is sent to the Council, which can propose its own changes, if required, and forwards it back to the Parliament for the second reading.
• The Parliament can reject it (as it did it in 1979, 1982, and 1984) or adopt it .

Scrutiny: the Parliament has powers over the European Commission and the Presidency of the Council.

• It can dismiss the Commission and the Commission needs to submit to the European Parliament regular reports, annual legislative programmes and reports on the implementation of the budget. The Council’s nominations for the positions of the President of the European Commission and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy must be confirmed by the European Parliament. Finally, the College of Commissioners must be approved by the European Parliament.
• The Presidency of the Council needs to report to the EP on its priorities and progress.
• The Parliament monitors the work of the Council of Ministers.

Appointments. The European Parliament :

• Appoints the President of the Commission, approves the appointment of the Commission and has power to dismiss it.
• Confirms  the appointment of the president and vice-president of the European Central Bank.
• Appoints the European Ombudsman.
• Consults on the appointments of the Court of Auditors

Wow!! so in essence when it comes right down to it, it can do f*** all about f*** all,because ultimately it's the 27 Heads of State or their representatives acting as the EU Council that do all the heavy lifting.

The UK has 73 allocated seats made up of 12 artificially constructed  "regions" with 6 MEPs in each plus an extra seat for Gibraltar included in the South West  "region" allocation of 7. The closed party list system, a recognisable and acceptable form of proportional representation,means you have one vote only and that for the party and its list of 6 candidates as ranked by them. Which is a merde really ,whereas giving the voter the choice of marking the ballot paper in order of individual preference across any and all parties' candidates 1 through to 6 may be deemed unwieldy but the actual exercise of autonomy of choice would be superior.

The ultimate irony of course remains ( unintended pun) the fact of the UK's participation in the 23 May elections,as seems increasingly likely as at 24 April. Such is the magnitude of the debasement of our constitutional order that has been wrought on the Electorate by the Legislature in their vainglorious pursuit of annulling the Democratic result of the EURef 23 June 2016.

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For an apparently inchoate protest movement, Extinction Rebellion certainly seem to have caught the limelight.

Here's what the inveterate, smug metropolitan Labour cultural elitist hack Polly Toynbee spewed forth on Thursday April 18:

" Day four of Extinction Rebellion, which has been a phenomenal success, as climate protesters occupy four pressure points in Britain’s congested capital. Everything has conspired to maximise attention for their climate cause, with the news unnaturally quiet in this pause in Brexit hostilities.

 

Extinction Rebellion: trio charged over train protest in Canary Wharf

 

Climate protesters are the soul of peace and goodwill, their pink boat welcoming Oxford Street shoppers, who mainly stop to talk. The surprisingly few police are friendly, with the 400 arrests curiously voluntary, people well-warned in advance so those who can’t be arrested step back. Is it true the police cuts have left too little capacity to arrest everyone? Two officers laugh: “You might say that, we couldn’t possibly comment”.

The sun shines on them as Waterloo Bridge is magically transformed into the Boris Johnson £53m garden bridge that never was, with a long line of trees in big pots down the middle and rows of flowers. The calm of the carless river crossing is a good advertisement for how cities might be. “Come and join us, take time off work,” Gail Bradbrook, one of the organisers, exhorted Today programme listeners this morning. She’s right. All who can should be there. "

And on and on the haggard bien pensant hack drivelled ad nauseam. 

The strapline " trio charged " refers to three eco-vandals who unlawfully endangered the health and safety of passengers and sabotaged the efficient operation of the light railway by having two trespassers on a train carriage roof and a third who super-glued themselves to another carriage on the platform.This is criminality pure and simple.

BBC Radio 5Live in particular was / is being pimped out to be the broadcasting arm of XR ( as the  Occupy/Anonymous/Green  Soros EU funded hackers and activists like to abbreviate their own extinction rebellion moniker ) .
On April 17th ,( day 3 of the Eco-millenarianist take over of our capital city) the Radio 5 presenter Rachel Burden hosted a phone -in where over population and increasing material consumption were repeatedly identified and demonised as the primary cause of the ecological apocalypse that only hordes of lecturers,teachers,sundry academics,lawyers and other intelligent left wing middle class virtue signallers could help avert.

For educated people, not one of them mentioned the 18th Century polemicist Malthus on whose 1798 writings on population numbers they so clearly base their entire deranged,paranoid belief system.The state sponsored eugenics policies of the Scandinavian countries right up to the 1970s never got a mention nor did China's utterly insane Maoist " one child " policy.
And yet somehow the Green,vegan Islington hipster Labour intelligentsia insisted that  people needed to have fewer children.No doubt they'll be the ones enforcing such policies;out of necessity obviously and not just because they believe that ordinary folk and the lives they lead are a scourge upon Mother earth.

And then there's the XR ,Green,Vegan,LIb-Lab veneration of the pseudo-prophet David Attenborough. An evergreen on the BBC with his wide-eyed manic stare and pseudo biblical pronouncements; but discussing him or them any further would be environmentally damaging.

There's already more than enough horseshit to go round.

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Background:  Here's what BBC News OnLine had to report:-

Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange has been arrested at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Mr Assange took refuge in the embassy seven years ago to avoid extradition to Sweden over a sexual assault case that has since been dropped.

The Met Police said he was arrested for failing to surrender to the court.
Ecuador's president Lenin Moreno said it withdrew Mr Assange's asylum after his repeated violations of international conventions.

But Wikileaks tweeted that Ecuador had acted illegally in terminating Mr Assange's political asylum "in violation of international law".

Home Secretary Sajid Javid tweeted: "I can confirm Julian Assange is now in police custody and rightly facing justice in the UK"

It's a sad day for whistle-blowers, investigative journalists and truth-diggers everywhere.It's an even sadder day for what tattered shreds remain of the UK's reputation for the integrity of the rule of law and respect for truth and justice.

EU partner and NATO ally Turkey routinely persecutes,arrests,condemns by show-trials and imprisons thousands of journalists. In Malta. ( EU member state and member of the British Commonwealth), a government with much to fear sees to it that a fearless,incisive investigative journalist is murdered by a car bomb.In Slovakia,another EU member state,they do things a little differently.An investigative journalist exposing Italian Mafia links to high state officials is ruthlessly gunned down alongside his girlfriend.

No mainstream political party or politician of any consequence or standing in the UK let alone the rest of the EU has ever seriously addressed this carnage being visited upon the freedom of  the Press and those exposing criminality of the highest order. Virtually no Trades Union nor extra-parliamentary organisation of the Left has even summoned up the superficial courage to voice outrage or organise against this.

The metropolitan Police itself,as journalist and Commentator nonpareil, Peter Hitchens once opined,are nothing more than " paramilitary social workers ".

Hundreds of law-abiding,respectable subjects of Her Majesty are brazenly accosted by the Police on a daily basis and subjected to State sanctioned harassment,intimidation and outright persecution on the ludicrous basis of having been reported - denounced anonymously, for having used what the Law calls " hate speech ". Hate speech is actually defined as -whatever the person reporting it as being, even if they themselves weren't the object of whatever was said or written about!

Julian Assange is being prepared for extradition to the USA to face the judgemental wrath of the Washington DC neocon /liberal humanitarian interventionist co-establishment.

In short,Julian Assange has made career of pissing off the wrong people more than just once too often and their patience has paid off.

As for me, I'm with the dissidents,the general nuisances to whatever establishment status quo feels like its being pissed off.

#IAmJulianAssange

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We're stuck inside the EU's prison walls. We remain " EU Citizens ",even though we were never asked if we wanted to become EU citizens in the first place let alone asked to make a decision about it.

The creation of  EU Citizenship opened up the Road to Sedition upon which the UK is journeying.
I originally posted this on February 21 2017 -And So It Goes...#849 :-

The trouble with people who suffer from paranoid delusions is that, clearly there might well indeed be someone out to get them. But not right now.

Various cities across  Britain were ,on Monday 20 February once again awash with the flotsam and jetsam of placard waving detritus. Yes, exactly the same shills out earning their CIA funded stipend who were placard waving and reciting platitudes with all the fervour of a papist penitent the previous week,were out metaphorically flagellating their own consciences yet again.

#stoptrump was supposed to be the catechism,although as the seemingly interminable hours of faux-rhetoric and student common room sedition passed, all manner of vituperative hyperbole ended up getting spouted and placards waved at it.

#Brexit was a popular target along with plaintive invocations against racism, islamophobia and the recently rediscovered complaint of xenophobia. The most bizarre rant amongst such a crowded field of idiolect terminology was the now trending and therefore fashionable lamentation involving the fate of EU citizens working and sojourning within the borders of the UK.

  For those who genuinely haven’t the foggiest notion as to how the world came to have such a thing as an ” EU citizen “,it maybe worth noting how this quasi-legal abortion came into existence. Via the 1992 Maastricht treaty as it happens. Which is :-

The Maastricht Treaty (formally, the Treaty on European Union or TEU) undertaken to integrate Europe was signed on 7 February 1992 by the members of the European Community in Maastricht, Netherlands.^[1] On 9–10 December 1991, the same city hosted the European Councilwhich drafted the treaty.^[2] Upon its entry into force on 1 November 1993 during the Delors Commission,^[3] it created the European Union and led to the creation of the single European currency, the euro. The Maastricht Treaty has been amended by the treaties of Amsterdam, Nice andLisbon.

 

A referendum was expected to take place in the United Kingdom in 2006 to decide whether the country should ratify the proposed Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. However, following the rejection of the Constitution by similar referendums in France in May 2005 and the Netherlands in June 2005, the UK vote was postponed indefinitely.

The question was rendered moot when the constitution was superseded by the Treaty of Lisbon, which Parliament ratified in 2008 without holding a referendum.

 POSTSCRIPT

And here we are 2 years on, the bogus #The3Million aka #PeoplesVote aka EU funded seditionists spearheaded by Labour have actually won!