Monckton refused a 3 minute rebuttal in a 60 minute BBC documentary about him.

UKIP's Lord Monckton is set to be featured in a documentary on BBC4 tonight called "Meet The Climate Sceptics". According to well known global warming sceptic James Delingpole, it is a stitch up: the makes of the documentary went to great lengths to stress that they intended to produce a fair and balanced documentary, only to bury those who go against the global warming consensus.

Christopher Monckton is apparently a big part of the documentary and is so appalled with its content that he took the makers and the BBC to court, arguing that he had been misled and that the documentary gives a skewered view. He requested that he get a 3 minute rebuttal in the 60 minute program, but the High Court have told him no.

I wouldn't mind if this wasn't the BBC, but when a broadcaster is state-funded and meant to be impartial, isn't it a bit alarming when the main protagonist of a documentary that is going to be on that channel feels they have been misled and isn't allowed a fair right of reply?

Senior Tory MEP hails expansion of unrestricted immigration to Taiwan.

Don't just think that uncontrolled, unrestricted immigration is limited to within the EU's own member states. Senior Conservative MEP Charles Tannock and others like him are over the moon that the EU now has a "visa-free" system with Taiwan's population of 23 million. I have absolutely nothing against Taiwan or its people, but shouldn't we have a system whereby immigration is controlled via work permits and visas so we know who is here and why?

It is interesting that the Conservative Party claim to want to bring immigration levels down while supporting open-borders with another 23 million people. Doesn't quite add up, does it?

Rand Paul proposes $500 billion worth of cuts in the US.

Tory cuts? As Nick Clegg today boasts that public spending in 2015 under the Coalition will still be 5% of GDP higher than in 1997, Senator Rand Paul has been proposing a truly fundamental shake-up in the role of federal government in the US.

His plan is to cut over $500 billion from America's federal budget in one year. This would be achieved by scrapping entire departments such as the Department of Education, with Paul believing as Ronald Reagan did that such matters should be left to individual states and locally accountable people to decide. The Department of Energy would also be scrapped and rolled into the Defence department where he argues the two already have cross-over and the defence and war budgets themselves would also be greatly reduced.

It is certainly an eye-catching proposal from the Tea Party favourite that puts into perspective the comparatively tame Coalition proposals. Far from apologising for his proposal for cuts to government spending as Clegg and Cameron seem to in this country, Paul stands on a principle of being proud to want to ideologically change the size and reach of central government. While to some it may seem extreme, Paul's points about avoiding the type of chronic government-debt crisis that has been seen in Europe are worth listening to.

Just who could afford to "bail out" the US?

Andrew Neil has done our young people a great service.

Think academic selection is nasty? Unnecessary? Evil? Shut up and listen to the 85% of my generation - school-leavers and first time voters - who have experienced what state education in this country has become and who want grammar schools brought back.

Andrew Neil's Posh and Posher - Why Public Schoolboys Run Britain was a devastating account of how the decline of a grammar school system has meant that ordinary working class and middle class kids have no real route to the top of political life. I thank Andrew Neil for going against the grain and highlighting what a state we are in. Too many ignore the reality that our kids now live in when it comes to state education and the gross inequality that exists.

I have gone on and on about this issue, but it is the one that provided me with tangible evidence of why I had to get involved and help UKIP. As the Eton millionaires and Oxbridge elite talk down the grammar school system, it is ordinary kids who suffer. I know they will. I've seen it. But more importantly unlike those who joust on the Commons front benches, I've experienced it. It ain't pretty and it ain't right.

Cameron's Conservatives are lucky the electorate didn't know what they stood for.

Janet Daley writes on ConservativeHome's findings that many voters were unsure of David Cameron and his inner circle's commitment to values. As Daley says, voters saw the Tory leadership as:

politicians whose real values were unclear and whose commitment to any particular principle was likely to shift

This first part about real values being unclear was a superb piece of political operating by Cameron and his PR team. I mean, would the Tories have received as many votes as they did if the electorate knew they were voting for a Party that wanted to hand the EU more money and according to one of its own MEPs, are handing over powers to Brussels faster than Labour did? If "vote Tory" meant "fewer people will go to prison"? And if putting your X next to the Conservative candidate would lead to a British Prime Minister who is charging each family £500 for an increase in the foreign aid budget while slashing funding at home?

Many of Cameron's own MPs and MEPs are disgusted at his time in office. Tory voters will be angrier still. I would say that Team Cameron played a blinder; their supporters have been mugged by reality. This is what their Party now stands for, defined by actions and no longer by Cameron's words.

Hopefully when voting Tory next time, they will now be acutely aware of David Cameron's true values.

YouGov: UKIP outpolling LibDems...

Well at least among those aged 18 - 24 in the latest YouGov poll. As the LibDems are shown to be supported by 7% of 18 - 24 year old's, UKIP are on a whooping 8% from the age bracket.

Okay, so its one poll and polls can throw up rogue results. But it is still to my knowledge the only time UKIP has ever polled as the third Party amongst the youngest bracket of voters. As Chairman of the Party's youth wing, I am of course delighted.

It is quite simple: UKIP want a 21st century Britain that has sensible trade deals with European nations as well as the Commonwealth and the big developing economic powerhouses like China and Brazil. We also want a return to academic selection, the abolition of tuition fees, a flat tax, a sensible immigration system and a whole host of other common sense, straight talking policies. We are a Party that is forward-looking and that has a radical outlook as to how a 21st century Britain could and should be.

It appears that that message is finally getting through to young voters, long may it continue.

David Cameron lobbies hard to stop any potential referendum of any sort on the EU.

It is telling that only a paltry 30 Tory MPs at most are reported to be looking to rebel and back an amendment which would seek to ensure that Parliament decides when there should be a referendum on a transfer of power to the EU.

Of course David Cameron and the government wants a Referendum Lock which leaves this power in the hands of the courts and as Nigel Farage says, leaves you with a lock that could be picked by a child. In fact when the Tories' own Europe Minister defended the government's bill today over at ConservativeHome, he was ripped to shreds by his own Party's activists. The Tory tactic of talking Eurosceptic while surrendering to the EU's every whim is starting to be rumbled by even those who wanted Cameron as Prime Minister in the first place.

Perhaps what is even more telling is that Cameron is resorting to stiff-arming potential rebels in the Commons tea room. Remember, these aren't even necessarily MPs who want Britain to leave the EU, but merely for Parliament to have the power of deciding when a transfer of power to the EU is worthy of triggering a referendum.

It is astonishing to think that many millions of self-described Eurosceptic Tories voted for a Party whose Leader continues to relentlessly push a pro-EU agenda, seeking to quash anything resembling a referendum on the issue while telling the public that they will get just that with the new European Union Bill.

The destruction of grammar schools has led to the destruction of social mobility.

Harry Mount over at The Telegraph says it all:

The replacement of Johnson with Ed Balls means that the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Shadow Chancellor and the Deputy Prime Minister all went to Oxford or Cambridge. With Balls an old boy of fee-paying Nottingham High School, it means that all of them – with the exception of Ed Miliband – were privately educated.

It's hard to argue then with the thesis of a TV programme, Posh and Posher – Why Public Schoolboys Run Britain, to be shown this week. It suggests that meritocracy and social mobility are dead in British political life, largely thanks to the collapse of grammar schools, a collapse supported by both Tory and Labour governments. The first post-grammar-school political generation has ended up being a public-school generation.

From 1964-97, every British Prime Minister, from Harold Wilson to John Major, was grammar-school educated

What a brutal, sad reality. As a working class lad I've always been of the mind that grammar schools really are the only way for Britain to ensure true social mobility; it's the policy that tipped me over the edge an made me join UKIP and become politically active when I was 18. Council estate Tories like David Davis agree, and the proof is in the pudding: as the Etonians (Cameron, Osbourne et al.) have dissed and abandoned Tory support for grammars along with Labour, we now see politics dominated by very wealthy men and women who were born into millionaire families.

And we see the same in media. And in business. The truth is, when grammar schools were abandoned by the government and systematically taken apart in most areas of the country, our country radically changed for the worse. Selective education remained: but it was now selection by wealth rather than ability. Can you now afford to send your kid to a good private school or live in a rich area with a good state school? If you can't, your child's life chances have already probably been set way back.

It makes me sick when bleeding heart Guardian-types talk social mobility while dissing academic selection. Their fantasy of every state school being top notch and every child being academically minded and equal has led to the devastation of opportunity for ordinary boys and girls.

My generation know this: 85% of my generation want more grammar schools. In areas where they still exist, parents want more of them and they are massively oversubscribed. It is only elitist, out of touch Westminster opinion that stops sense prevailing and true mobility being re-introduced into our society.

But I don't expect the millionaires who run our country to understand. After all, they won't be sending their kids to the state schools mess that ordinary people are now left with. 

The license fee must be scrapped for the BBC to improve.

Peter Sissons' devastating account of the institutional left-wing bias inside the BBC hardly surprises: supporters of The Guardian? Check. In favour of the EU? Check. In favour of government spending? Check. Support for all things "green"? Check. You get the idea.

Personally I like the BBC and would pay for it. But the license fee is an outdated concept, now that we live in a world where hundreds of channels are transmitted digitally and where people tend to subscribe to packages that let them pick what they do and don't want to pay for. Slam Murdoch all you want, but people hand their money over to him willingly. Sky earn their profit whereas the BBC collect it.

The BBC's entitlement to public funding is what will stop it ever radically changing to improve itself and looking seriously and critically as its own bias. Once those disgruntled viewers are able to choose whether they think the BBC is worth paying for, reforms would be made. They would have to be for the channel to survive, and all the better it would become too.

The license fee is quite simple an analogue concept in a digital age where people have choice. The BBC should have to work to earn people's money, they should not be entitled to it.

The Express to publish 24-page special on why Britain should leave the EU.

Pinching yourself? I don't blame you. For those of us who believe that Britain should withdraw from the European Union, this Saturday will be a special one. As announced by the Express' Chief Political Commentator Patrick O'Flynn, the Express are going to have a 24-page special this Saturday outlining why wanting Britain out of the EU is the right thing.

Hats off to the Express. Their radical, in-touch approach to the issue is leaving the Mail and the Telegraph looking positively stale in comparison as they continue to suck up to the Tory mantra of "in Europe but not ran by Europe", a hopelessly outdated and ill-conceived stance that is a joke to any objective bystander.

There are clearly still some decent men and women at the top levels of the British media who aren't willing to totally ignore public opinion but join it in pushing for us to decide who makes the laws that we must live by.

Oldham could spell trouble for the Nicks.

With the Liberal Democrats in pieces as they continue to sell out their principles for the sake of a cosy power-share with the Tories, the Oldham and Saddleworth by-election fast approaches. From being only a few hundred votes behind Labour in the constituency in mid-2010, I have heard there is a decent chance the LibDems could start 2011 by slumping to third place behind the Tories with the Conservative candidate going down well in areas of the constituency despite minimal central Party backing.

That would be an unmitigated disaster that would spook grassroots LibDems no end and pose serious questions as to the direction Nick Clegg has taken his Party in. Slumps in opinion polls are one thing (the LibDems are now on a single digit), but if LibDem MPs see that electoral wipe out is now a very real reality, they will surely muster a challenge to Clegg's pro-Coalition leadership of the Party which has wilfully submitted its defining features and policies for a seat at the millionaires Cabinet table. Or perhaps that is presuming too much backbone on behalf of the likes of Simon Hughes and other lefty LibDems who have never looked at ease with what Clegg and Cameron are doing, yet have defended it time and again as if the LibDems had no choice but to accept a supporting-man role in the Coalition and to campaign against things they once promised like the abolition of tuition fees.

Clegg isn't the only Nick who is likely to be a bit bashful when the Oldham results come through. BNP Leader Nick Griffin, I'm told, ducked standing in the election because he was told he was likely to be smashed by UKIP's candidate Paul Nuttall. For those who don't know (you bloody well should) current Deputy Leader, MEP and the man a lot of UKIP members would like to see succeed Nigel Farage as Leader, moi included. Nuttall's first wave of billboards have carried the slogan "cutting crime, not jobs", a clever and concise snapshot which pretty much defines how on the money Nuttall is as a candidate and a character overall. And billboards there have been, with the UKIP by-election team rolling the dice of anticipating an early by-election date and being rewarded with January 13th.

But Oldham is supposed to be one of the BNP's North West power bases. With Griffin now in as an MEP for the North West, this should be the type of electoral statement they are able to make a strong statement in. In fact, it may be more like a whimper. I have heard the quality of their campaign has been incredibly poor, with outdated electoral materials referring to a Councillor who has left the Party and even Gordon Brown.

Make no mistake; if the BNP are drubbed by UKIP (and I think we can all drink to that), there are likely to be consequences for Griffin who is already having a turbulent time inside the far-right (or is it far-left?) group as financial problems mount for them.

So, spare a moment to think of these dear old Nick's when the by-election results come through. Nick Clegg, only six months ago seen by an increasing number as a bastion for hope and new politics as Cleggmania caught fire and Nick Griffin, who promised to open up the sea of change when he won one of two MEP seats for the BNP in 2009, could both very well be in some big trouble post-Oldham.

Maybe someone should ring up the animal welfare agency. It looks like Nick's may not be for life, but just for Christmas.