THE McSPURIOUS CLAIMS OF McMONCKTON OF McSCOTLANDSHIRE

Loony right wing Mcnutjob Lord Monckton is, as far as we can discover, no more Scottish than fly in the air. He is from Kent; his father was from Kent and his grandfather was from Kent. The only link he seems to have with Scotland is he has an estate here. Sorry Chris but being an absentee Scottish landlord does not make you “more Scottish than most Scotsmen” (as you recently claimed to be in an STV interview...you remember, the one where you spuriously claimed that Alex Salmond was expelled from the Labour Party for being too left wing!). 

In another tenuous link to Scotland, his McNobleness did try to become an MSP in 2011 standing for UKIP on the Central Scotland and Fife list, coming 7^th with 1.1% of the vote. Unfortunately, that doesn't make him more Scottish than the Scots either.
  

What milord seems to be good at is either being a half-wit or a liar. (Case in point being his spurious claim to any link to Scotland.) In this video he claims that the Dunblane Massacre of 1996 took place under a Socialist Government that then introduced knee jerk legislation:

That would be the socialist government of John Major then? 

Interestingly all three shooting rampages that have taken place in the UK have been under Tory Prime Ministers; Hungerford in 1987, Dunblane 1996 and Cumbria in 2010. No doubt in Lord Monckton’s la la land all three PM’s involved are socialists.

I don't recommend that you watch more than a few minutes of the video as milord cod-face manages to put so little feeling or conviction into his right wing anti climate change rant that it quickly becomes more of a tedious boring drone that I'm sure has the interviewer chewing his foot off to get through. Let’s hope the would be journalist is a better motivational writer than he is a speaker or I don't think those climate change fascists down-under have anything to fear other than a surge in membership.

  

Monkton inherited his lordly title after 1999 and is not, by rights, a member of the House of Lords. However, he widely claims that he is in fact a member of the upper house of the UK legislature but without the right to sit or vote. 

The House of Lords authorities, frustrated by more spurious claims (he’s good at them) have taken the unprecedented step of publishing, on the parliamentary website, a “cease and desist” letter to Monkton from the Clerk of the Parliaments. The letter concludes “I am publishing this letter....so that anyone who wishes to check whether you are a member of the House of Lords can view this official confirmation that you are not”.

Monkton, desperate for a seat in the Lords, has stood in four by-elections for vacant seats, created by the death of a sitting hereditary peer. (There are 92 hereditary peers left in the HOL and when one dies they elect another one from among their numbers). 

He has not as yet received a single vote!

WHERE IS ALL THE WIND COMING FROM?

I’ve made a point of never coming down on one side or the other of the climate change debate.

With respect to those who have strong views on the subject, I really believe that, unless you are a meteorologist, or some other kind of physicist with specialised knowledge, the likelihood of being able to distinguish between the seemingly learned opinions that there IS climate change and those which deny it, is small.

So, I don’t understand enough about it to have an informed opinion, and I don’t follow a particular political philosophy which would steer me in any direction.

I have few vested interests; I’m not a businessman with interest in maintaining the lowest possible costs to my company so that I can maximize profits at any cost. Neither am I one of the ecologist types that worries about butterflies flapping their wings in Brazil and causing storms over Oslo. I’m somewhere in the middle, possibly with a lazy streak that tells me that all this recycling is just too much effort.

But, even I can’t help noticing that this is the first of June, and that I’d to put on a thick skiing jacket to go out today, and even then in the sharp gusts of wind I was cold. Even I can’t ignore that last week I’d to hang on to my garden arch as winds of around 100 mph tore through my garden breaking trees and scattering the new leaves which had only appeared a couple of weeks before, as if it were autumn.

Global warming it ain’t, and that’s for sure. But some sort of climate change it appears to be, because, although this is the worst one, it seems to me that for the last 4 or 5 years, this has been the pattern. A reasonable April followed by constant wind and cold all summer.

Certainly my neighbour, who is 75 years old, said that he can’t remember any such weather in his life time.

Can you?

OFF TO THE STATES FOR EASTER TO LEARN ABOUT SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT

I’ve always wondered why it is that people need to fly all over the world to talk about man-made climate change, and whether or not you believe in it, people are doing that all the time.

It doesn’t particularly interest me normally, but this time it is the Scottish parliament which is sending 4 MSPs and 2 officials to America, in fact to Boston, New York and Washington DC to “highlight” the dangers of climate change, whatever that means. This is a non party thing. The presiding officer is going, along with members from the SNP, the Labour Party and the Tories. Whether the Liberals didn’t want to go, or just weren’t asked remains to be answered.

The total cost of this exercise, supposedly connected with tartan week in the USA, is thought to be in the region of £30,000, given that the MSPs, officials are travelling club class.

According to the Scotsman they ‘will focus on the three key areas of climate change, sustainable transport and opportunities around the green economy’. What expertise in these matters any of the visitors had is also not known.

MSP Robin Harper (Greens) said: "For this cross-party Holyrood delegation to be jetting off on a jolly to multiple US cities in order to fact-find on issues relating to sustainability and the environment is ever so slightly ridiculous and largely unnecessary.” He also pointed out, not unreasonably, that if sustainability was the name of the game then the USA was perhaps not the best place to go to learn more.

I agree. We already have three ministers going to America for Tartan week, that’s fair enough. We need to make a good impression there. Trade and tourism depends upon it. But there is no need to have other members of parliament there. The rest of us are belt tightening, and parliament should be too. Easter jollies should be a thing of the past.


Pictures: Transport in Boston and Washington not looking overly sustainable to me.

STRUTTING YOUR STUFF ON THE WORLD STAGE WHILE AT HOME THE COUNTRY IS FALLING APART

According to The Times Mr Brown (clearly preparing for a meeting with his disgruntled constituents in the attached picture), is intending to be the first leader to arrive in Copenhagen, as talks there start to lose their momentum and developing nations stage a walk out.

Mr Climate Change Miliband (as opposed to Mr Foreign Miliband), says that it is a sign of how seriously he takes the subject of climate change. Right! So naturally, as we all believe everything Mr C C Miliband says, that must be it.

On the other hand, it could just be that, with an election in the offing, Mr Brown wants to show us “ordinary people” that he is leading the world through yet another catastrophe, thus cementing his status as not just “a” world leader, but “the” world leader.

With speculation rife that he will call a snap election early in the new year (which frankly I doubt), Downing Street might be hoping to use the Copenhagen summit to burnish the Prime Minister's image as a world statesman, especially if he can help to engineer a meaningful accord to tackle global warming, reports The Times.

It may have escaped Mr Brown’s attention, but the great bulk of the British population is suffering badly from the last disaster through which he “led” the world. Many of us don’t really have much time for a conference that has involved thousands of delegates from all over the world flying to Denmark (where the temperatures for this week range between 2 C and -8 C, so not much global warming there). Some of us aren't convinced of the 'man made global change' stuff, and even those who are may be wishing that Mr Brown would commit just some of that great leadership skill that he is determined to show, to sorting out some of the problems that exist in the United Kingdom.

Unemployment is soaring; soldiers are being killed and maimed in an unwinnable war using substandard equipment; postal and travel strikes loom; the national debt is soaring out of control; penioners, the low paid, sick and unemployed people are having to choose between heat and food; the country remains in recession after all the other G20 countries have moved out of it (except Spain, which isn’t in the G20, despite Mr Brown’s protestations to the contrary), etc, etc.

Why don’t politicians see that most of us don’t give a stuff about world statesmen and their prancing around acting like they matter, especially when they don’t?

Clearly Presidents Obama and Hu are the people who can make this thing work, or not. With their massive economies and huge political clout they can influence change. A broke and broken little island of the coast of Europe can’t. My message to Mr Brown is: Get back home and start tackling OUR problems and leave the big boys to sort out real or imagined world issues.