Having forced people who smoke (a perfectly legal habit) to stand outside public buildings like naughty schoolchildren, the iron fist of Establishment lunacy may now usher forth a series of aliments from pneumonia to hypothermia likely to be experienced by the average smoker.  Why?  Because the AGW apostles have their sights set on the eradication of patio heaters.  Forget the booming economies of India and China with their carbon yeti prints.  The growing number of patio heaters people are now compelled to purchase – due to the prohibition of smoking (a perfectly legal habit) in enclosed public places – are the enemy within.  Who knows, the polar ice-caps could be melting at a rate of metres per second because of a few thousand heaters in public houses and car parks around the UK.  Yeah, sure.

‘Why don’t smokers wear jumpers?‘ cry the environmental lobby.  Why don’t the environmental lobby mind their own business?  Do you have to go outside AND dress up like Roald Amundsen simply to enjoy a cigarette?  What next?  Will you only be able to smoke within 30ft of a building?  Will you be banned from smoking in your own house if you have pre-pubescent children?  How about the banning of smoking around animals?

This move is the foul hand of a lobby that has been indulged far too much.  Having witnessed smokers relegated to the status of social pariahs, other like-minded groups and individuals are playing to their emotions by using the hollow husk of ‘green’ fascism to make their enjoyment of a cigarette (a perfectly legal habit) even more restrictive than it was before.  In the interests of personal freedom, I urge as many readers as possible to purchase a patio heater if that is what they desire.  If some smokers believe standing outside on a cold, dark December, freezing their knackers off, benefits the longevity of planet Earth, they deserve to get hypothermia!

In conversation with our excellent dressmaker in the runup to my wedding to Mrs Rightwing Zionist Conspirator (‘what kind of woman would marry a nasty rightwinger’ etc etc) she explained how she had been on holiday to extremely rural Romania a couple of years ago. The idyllic (a word I use here with some precision) village subsisted quite happily, sustaining itself in the kind of communal manner that would make most genuine hippies weep with envy.

Each family had its own cow or occasionally cows, who lived in barn/courtyard areas adjunct to the family houses. Each morning they would be let out to graze together as one large herd in the fields, be milked at some point and then at around the same time every evening would, with no prompting whatsoever from any human agency, would all troop back en masse to their own individual enclosures and gently butt on the door until let back in shortly afterwards.

The villagers also had a bit of a sweet tooth it seems, and took it in turns to work a large patch of sugar beet, which would then be transported to a local sugar factory to be worked into usable sugar for the entire village – no profit involved, just purely for their own use. They did this kind of thing a lot with individual crops – money meant very little to them as an end in and of itself it seems.

That was then.

They knew what was coming. They knew, and fatalistically told my dressmaker friend, that everything would change once Romania joined the EU. They knew that this model of rural existence, little different even under Ceaucescu’s vile regime, was about to vanish in the name of progress. Now, the cows which had managed to find themselves all the way back home every night like homing pigeons without the aid of any form of Regulation or Directive, have to have their own supply of clean, plumbed in drinking water in each enclosure.

The villagers’ own houses didn’t all have that as little as two years ago. Can you imagine the staggering cost of installing plumbing for your *livestock* in an isolated rural area when you don’t even have it yourself? They told my friend that they knew full well that this would leave the village in debt for years – debt which they would now have to work to the bone to repay when before they only needed to work to sustain themselves.

So when you think about all those bright young ‘highly skilled’ city things who have flooded into Britain from Eastern European countries such as Poland and Romania, spare a thought for what they have left behind – rural economies decimated in a matter of months by regulations they have somehow successfully managed without for a hundred years – however did they *do* it?

There’s a moment in Terry Pratchett’s ‘Interesting Times’ where a bureaucrat anyone would recognise as an archetype they have at some point encountered in their daily lives is asked by a struggling translator:

“What is it you call the things that grind corn?”

“Peasants.”

I don’t know whether Pratchett is pro-, anti- or neutral on the subject of the EU. But he certainly seems to recognise a privileged, leech-fat parasite which sucks the very lifeblood out of people when he sees one. I wonder when the rest of Europe will learn to do the same?

In case you missed it last week, here is another opportunity to sign my petition calling on the Privy Council not to kow-tow to separatist sentiment and advise the Queen to change the name of Londonderry.  There will be a reminder every week until the end of January.

Londonderry it is and Londonderry it MUST remain.

No surrender!

I note that the Commons Transport Select Committee has identified a new area where terrorists could plan an attack on air travellers, and that is upon the queues waiting before passing through "Security Checkpoints" at British airports. As this is the first point at which all travellers are checked for ‘exploding shoes’ or ‘cosmetics which have been enhanced with hydrogen peroxide’, it is at first glance, a realistic assessment of an expnsion of the terror threat against Britain and all subjects of Her Majesty. However, as some besides myself have previously pointed out, the whole ‘Security’ purview, and the resultant queues, are based upon a premise that we are all suspect, and therefore we should all be checked!

Now that the spineless Labour Government has bowed to home-grown terror, and invited the IRA bombers and killers into power, the need to check White people as possible terror fanatics has largely disappeared, although it must be said that the only IRA killers who died as a result of their own explosives, either alone or along with their victims, were ‘Own Goals’. The dedicated murderers weren’t that dedicated! So who remains? All Asians, all muslims, all blacks, especially those named ‘Trevor’, slot them all together and strip them down in a secure enclosure, and the queues will magically disappear.

 Problem solved!

Pakistan is our alleged ally in the war on terror but Pakistan is also a key breeding ground for militant Islam and is a rogue nation at heart. Pakistan has now made clear it will not tolerate a US military operation against Osama bin Laden or other al-Qa’ida targets inside its territory, as Washington continues to push President Pervez Musharraf to do more to confront militants. "Any attack inside our territory would be unacceptable," a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Tasnim Aslam, said. "Any such action would be irresponsible and dangerous. We are combating terrorism in our own interest. We do not want our efforts to be undermined by any ill-conceived action from any quarter that is inconsistent with the principles of international law."

And that is precisely why we should ignore Aslam and go after every and all Al Queda targets with the clear intention of wiping them out. If the Pakistan government does not like it tough – they like the economic aid that the US puts it way enough. When one considers what the Musharraf administration is allowing in Waziristan, it is clear that it CANNOT be trusted to do what is in OUR best interests. If Bin Laden or any of his associates are located in Pakistan, we should go after them, no "ifs" or "buts".

Colonel Ghadafi, what a guy! He’s back to his US-Bashing terrorist loving best, boasting that Libya collected as much money from oil companies as they paid to the Lockerbie families. Nice. So anyway,  French President Nicolas Sarkozy is travelling to Tripoli to meet Ghaddafi, a day after the release of six foreign medics. The meeting is being seen as a sign of the normalisation of ties between Libya and the EU following the release. The foreign workers were held for eight years for infecting children with HIV. The five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian-born doctor, who served eight years of their life sentences, always maintained they were innocent.

It seems to me that Ghadafi saw the writing on the wall after the fall of Saddam and did what was necessary to save his neck but as with all tyrants, he can’t suppress the beast inside. I can understand why the EU wants to be his best friend, after all the Eurocrats have yet to meet a tyrant that they don’t want to embrace, particularly if there is money in it.

Girl Guides, best known for skills such as starting fires, want to learn about safe sex and assembling flat-pack furniture, a survey suggests. Teenage members are also asking to be taught how to write a CV and reduce their "carbon footprint". Some 80% of 16 to 25-year-olds in the movement want safe-sex advice and 93% want guidance on how to manage money, according to a survey of 1,000 guides. Chief Guide Liz Burnley said it was important to be "truly relevant". Earlier this year, it was announced older guides would be trained as "peer educators" to teach others some of whom are as young as 10 about such things as sexual health and binge drinking.

The malign influence of liberals is sickening to behold, bringing the once decent values of such institutions as the Girl Guides into the dirt. I do not believe for one second that teenage girls, above all else, want to know what their carbon footprint is and what sexual practises are best – I DO believe the liberals that now infest these organisations do believe these things and now seek to impose them on their girls and so subvert the organisation.

I know that Alison has already eloquently covered (if you’ll pardon the pun) the topic of how Iran is using the "fashion police" to enforce strict Islamic dress rules but it really is appalling what is being done to the women of Iran by the Mad Mullahs and to the apparent indifference of many in the West. Here’s an interesting article describing what it’s like to be out "on the beat" with the goons who enforce the fashions aspects of the ROP – this is just pure tyranny, the bullying of the people to conform to the dark ages mindset that so distinguishes Islam. What a hateful regime and yet there are many who think they can bo business with it. I say that you can’t and the only sort of engagement with the Mullahs should be militarily.

Hey, isn’t Democrat Presidential Barack Obama quite the guy! I see that he has offered to meet without precondition with leaders of renegade nations such as Cuba, North Orea and Iran so touching off a war of words, with rival Hillary Clinton who has called  him naive and Obama linking her to President Bush’s diplomacy. Older politicians in both parties questioned the wisdom of such a course, while Obama’s supporters characterized it as a repudiation of Bush policies of refusing to engage with certain adversaries.

So Obama just wants to meet and talk to every tyrant on the planet this week. Last week he wanted to provide "appropriate" sex education to those in the kindergarten. Lord knows what he’ll suggest next week, but here’s my best three guesses.

1. Abolish all border controls – you gotta love your neighbour and let them move into your house if they want.

2. Embrace global warming alarmism by crucifying the US economy.  You gotta be a good green citizen.

3. Invite Al Queda to the White House. Remember, a stranger is just a friend you haven’t yet met.