Free Republic

Nigel Farage could win a seat at Westminster within weeks after a disgraced Conservative backbencher quit the Commons and forced an unexpected by-election. In a significant blow to the Tories, Patrick Mercer stepped down as MP for Newark on Tuesday night, only days before he was due to be suspended from Parliament for six months. His decision comes after a joint investigation by The Telegraph and the BBC’s Panorama programme disclosed that Mr Mercer had tabled a series of parliamentary questions and put down a motion after accepting £4,000 from undercover reporters. David Cameron now faces the prospect of Mr...

Knesset Speaker MK Yuli Edelstein wrote a letter of protest Sunday to his British counterpart, MP John Bercow, after a hidden camera video showed a British MP making an offensive anti-Semitic remark regarding a female IDF soldier he encountered on a visit to Israel. The MP resigned last week. "I was shocked to hear about the crude antisemitic words used by a Member of Parliament, Patrick Mercer, regarding an event during his recent trip to Israel,” wrote Edelstein. “This was a totally unacceptable comment, certainly as made by a public figure.” "This comment is merely one of a number of...

A British member of parliament under fire in a corruption scandal was caught on camera describing an Israeli soldier as a “bloody Jew.” Patrick Mercer made the remark to a BBC reporter posing as a lobbyist in the investigation. The footage was broadcast Thursday. … “An 18-year-old girl, wearing a uniform, with her sort of hair in plaits, and crazy jewelry and open-toed sandals, with a rifle up my nose,” he said. “Who the ---- are you, you know? ‘Well I’m a soldier.’ Are you? You don’t look like a soldier to me. You look like a bloody Jew,” Mercer...

AT LEAST 400 Al-Qaeda terrorist suspects — double the previous estimates — are at large in Britain, according to police and MI5. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, director-general of MI5, has said the figure could be as high as 600 if all those thought to have returned from combat training in camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere are included. The new assessment — effectively a “terror audit” of Britain — was confirmed this weekend by one of Britain’s most senior police officers, who warned that shortages of trained surveillance teams were undermining attempts to monitor all the suspects. “With about 400...