Birkenhead Society Forum

The prudent thing to do now is to arm the rebels and fight side-by-side with them

2011-03-20T07:32:00.000-07:00

War is the most unpleasant of things. But all it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to nothing. Gaddafi is evil personified. He was responsible for the greatest mass murder on British soil, the Lockerbie bombings. For years he assassinated opposition leaders that lived overseas, and runs a ruthless centralised regime not so dissimilar to a Soviet model that has bounties placed on the heads of those who write against it. If he is to stay in power he would form an even greater threat to the territorial integrity of the British Isles than before, as a result of predictable terrorist acts as a reaction to the no-fly-zone. Cameron has an opportunity this week to amend the Spring budget to bolster the armed forces, so that any further military action including ground troop deployment is possible.

Britain is a member of the Permanent Five (P5) on the Security Council, thus one of the few states not only responsible for peace and security, but also upholding international law. The latter includes humanitarian law, so that internal civil-matters of states do not move from policing a disturbance to using indiscriminate military force against a mixture of civilian and civilian combatants. The latter is not a legitimate use of state authority in international law, and can only be characterised as mass murder. This is clearly happening in Libya.

To this end Britain has done extremely well, overall, in fulfilling its role as a P5 member over the last two decades. From supporting the territorial integrity of Kuwait, to making up for lost support on humanitarian grounds in the Former Yugoslavia by supporting NATO backed air-strikes. It has backed a war in Iraq in 2003, though the case was disingenuously put by the Government, it was, whatever those that are emotionally charged on this most emotive of issues think, in the spirit of the UN resolutions (689, 1441) and within the spirit of being a P5 member. It ensured that the UN, in dealing with Saddam, did not mirror the League of Nations in dealing with Mussolini in Abyssinia over 60 years earlier. Further Britain has taken action against the evil of the Taliban, who murder women and children for power, in Afghanistan. It is bizarre to see Cameron shrink from the responsibility of being a P5 member, by weakening the armed forces. Our role on these fronts will no doubt continue for the foreseeable future, as the world is a long way off from being one full of peaceful self-governing states. Cameron ought to be able to see this.

Those who oppose military action including ground-troop deployment in Libya fail to see the importance and nature of the exclusive relationship between having a democracy and the building of a modern state. It is only through democratic consensus that a state has the capacity to deal with individual needs and choices. It is the first and important step in ensuring that power works for man and is accountable to him, not vice-versa. It makes mass economic enterprise a thing worth having, not a domination of wealth working against or omitting public interest solely centred in the hand of a few. Only when democracy is fully-functioning in a state does a state fully value peace, as citizens that benefit from self-government put pressure on Governments to act in their interest. To given an example, the British public’s opposition to the Iraq war, in terms of protests and now a public inquiry, is a luxury of democracy, that many in the world simply do not have.

The opposite paradigm to the democratic state, the concentration of power and wealth in a few, has characterised so many North African and Middle Eastern states so far. The case for full military action is strong here at this juncture: should Gaddafi fall, he may be replaced by a similar regime. Further, the security of the region now, not just territorially but also in democratic prosperity, would be more secure by military action supporting people who are not opposed to the very idea of freedom and accountable government. To ensure this, to liberate and to emancipate, we need to follow the paradigmn in Iraq and Afghanistan, learning from post-conflict logistical problems towards self-government. We have already laid the ground-work for a policy of ‘military assisted transition to democracy’. We should seize on this new doctrine and ensure a military backed safe transition to democracy in Libya.

This is not just a question of a moral right, but more importantly of duty. We have a free-press, accountable leadership, and, comparatively, a significantly broad dispersal of economic and political power in our society so that we can manipulate our governments to our benefit through the ballot box. For the life of me, I can’t see why the Libyans deserve less than an opportunity of effective self-government that democracy would bring them.

Britain has always embraced the spirit of battle, and was able to sculpt the modern world to its image through the courage and patriotic endeavour in belligerency. There is no need to forget our history, mask it with irrational complex of colonial guilt, not behold it with pride and follow this spirit into the 21st Century where it can be used in different paradigm for liberating man-kind from autocracy.

To conjure our innate spirit of courage, we should take the example of the greatest Briton of all time: In 1898 a young Lieutenant Winston Spencer Churchill managed to wiggle his way into Kitchener’s army, despite numerous rejections, to fight the power-craven Mahdi’s successor Khalifa Abdullah who had pretension to rule the region as an autocrat, not a million miles off the Gadaffis of today. Churchill literally escaped from the slow life in the 4th Hussars in India, to the 21st Lancers of Kitchener’s army in Sudan. He wanted to be a part of an army that sought to uphold the spirit of Gordon who had fallen three years earlier in Khartoum. Gordon had died holding Khartoum with a few men against an over-whelming force of the Mahdi, a specific sacrifice for the freedom inherent in the Christian way of life.

Kitchener’s eventual victory in the Sudan was a result of adequate supplies and planning, an example that Cameron needs to note. Three years were spent by the British army creating the Sudanese Military Railway, possibly the greatest feat of military engineering the 19th C, so that troops could more easily be deployed to the zone of intended belligerency. There was full support from Salisbury’s Government in London, not the type of vacillating over armed-forces support that characterises the current Government who see international aid as more important than funding the armed forces for global security. Kitchener’s victory was an exemplary display of Britain’s spirit to not give in to the power craven and delusional Khalifa Abdullah.

Today we need to evoke the spirit of Kitchener, we need to go to Libya and do the same.

Copyright Abhijit P.G. Pandya March 2011.
Copyright Birkenhead Society March 2011

Giving prisoners the vote: Q. The European Court of Human Rights- to whom is it unaccountable for when it behaves illegally? Ans. Member States

2011-02-21T15:38:00.001-08:00

Giving prisoners the vote: Q. The European Court of Human Rights- to whom is it unaccountable for when it behaves illegally? Ans. Member States
I have already warned about the European Convention on Human Rights this time last year. Then I said: 'The European Convention on Human Rights is a unique hypocrisy amongst instruments claiming to protect liberty. For all the supposed liberties it grants (which reflect select values of a few lawyers and civil servants and not the people of Europe that its title (Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms) grandiosely seems to claim), it allows the state to define circumstances in which to take them away. But it is more than this, in classic ‘anti-liberal’ spirit, the Convention also defines the limits of the rights it espouses, through the existence of constrictive provisos upon which they can be relied upon.

An inherent feature of the concept of 'rights' is to have an unlimited number of claims against the state. That it is the duty of the state to provide for them, irrespective of the merit of the individual bringing forward the claim.'

This has now been show by the absurd issue of prisoner's votes. Bentham, one of the great 19th Century Liberals, reflected on the history of liberty in England and noted that abuse of power occurs when power is in a few hands. Though the tyranny of monarchy had gone, what he feared then was a tyranny of unelected judges. That it was vital that Parliament develop itself constitutionally to have clear supremacy, under positive law, to protect democracy from hyperactive judges. No one would have thought we would have signed up to a treaty that did exactly the opposite: to gave a clear licence to judges to be politicians. Alas, only if the Government in the 1950s had consulted that expert on treaties (the world expert), the British lawyer, Lord McNair. He would have pointed out how the text was open to abuse. This possible expansive approach to treaty interpretation is superbly expostulated in his masterly work on the law of treaties. (Oddly McNair was later the President of the Strasbourg court, though a very refrained and thoughtful judge).

This was not done. What we now have is foreign elected judges, from significantly diverse legal backgrounds (many from states that have no rule of law)making political decisions, for our country, through legal means. There is little to suggest that David Cameron will do anything but voice a meager, and quiet, personal opinion on this.

What then is to hold this unelected court to account? Or are we seeing a new era of divine law, as in medieval times, that we cannot question or subject to reason? And does anyone get the more damning point, that European Court of Human Rights is making sentencing and criminal justice policy by making such a decision- thus clearly violating the text of the treaty?

Wake up Mr. Cameron, and wake up Britain.

Abhijit P.G. Pandya Copyright 2011
Birkenhead Society Copyright 2011.

The danger of the EU hedge fund directive, is to enervate the hedge fund market itself.

2011-02-06T15:41:00.000-08:00

The danger of regulation is that it can destroy the very market it is trying to regulate. Please indulge me in using a hypothetical. Imagine that you are a regulator who wishes to regulate haulage companies for the emissions of their vehicles. You use scientific data on pollution to construct an ideal quanta requirement. You then pass regulation to deal with this. You are not too bothered, sadly, that there will be some haulage companies that will go bust as they will not be able to afford the appropriate vehicles. What you are further, and in some ways more worryingly, blind to is that haulage companies have a specific range of vehicles for the needs of their customers. Further that maintenance of a specific range is directly related to their profitability, growth, and to meet rising costs such as fuel. This is only discovered years later, when it is only shown that unemployment (a more interesting thing for politicians to throw around) in the haulage industry is serious.

Now have a look at the arbitrary way the capital adequacy requirements in the hedge funds directive were formed. The very notion of regulation here is designed to militate against the products themselves. The difference between the hypothetical, above, and the hedge-fund market makes an even stronger case for non-regulation. This is that the hedge-fund market is itself a risk based market, thus profitability is entirely based on the allocation of risks itself. This must depend, as my hypothetical suggests, on the knowledge of the market agent, who is best able to assess it. Thus to regulate a base line of capital adequacy does not, in itself, obviate risk as the real risk is the choice of investment, not the absence of collateral. The regulation of the collateral may only slow down transactions, thus increasing their costs, but will not eviscerate risk itself. Further, these requirements may make transactions costs so high that viable investing may no longer be on the cards. This may harm certain sectors of the economy who depend on high risk investment, and play an important role in the economy such as the provision of infrastructure. Further this regulation may not be a solution. For some it was only the off-shore banks that were largely unregulated that kept better capital adequacy requirements. Perhaps it is time to reiterate that old adage that the market knows best.

Abhijit P.G. Pandya Copyright 2011

Abhijit P.G. Pandya Copyright Birkenhead Society

Monnet, Schuman and the myth that it was the avoidance of war that motivated the founding fathers of Europe

2011-02-05T18:20:00.000-08:00

A significant fallacy that surrounds theories as to the founding of Europe is that it was done by its chief architects to avoid war. Quite on the contrary, Monet (left) was an amateur economic theorist who, for most of his life, believed that co-operation led to a more effective production capacity at the time of war, not peace. He learned, during his time as a traveling salesman, of benefits of getting access to resources of other states for the benefit of France. Robert Schuman, the other key figure in the founding of the European project, was an analyst of corruption and efficiency in the French steel industry. Both men, particularly Schuman, would have been aware of the lagging of French industrial growth in comparison to both Britain and Germany by the start of the 20th C. Hence economic co-operation for the mutual benefit of both Germany and France, but particularly the latter, seemed like an interesting concept and one worth pursuing. The benefits of raw materials for the production of steel, and steel itself are useful in the stimulation of a manufacturing center to provide economic growth and employment. This was particularly so in an era where developed economies were not significantly service industry driven.

The Second World War gave the opportunity, and the catalyst, to realise these nascent ideas of economic co-operation to re-engage manufacture based industrial growth. The sentiment of avoiding war, was a useful political and rhetorical device for selling the project. Neither man would have been daft enough to believe that the mere signing of a treaty (of co-operation) would avoid war, in fact everything that had occurred during their lives would have lead to the opposite being true. Political support from other capitalist states was extant to avoid the spread of communism.

The reversal of purpose by pro-European integrationists, that political integration in Europe has been designed to avoid war, is one of the greatest lies both in our times and in the times of our recent forefathers. Those economic integrationists who also wish for a Federal system, must look at the U.S. Civil War for an example of conflict that can arise. The biggest admonition here comes from the fact that the U.S. Civil War occurred despite a common constitutional settlement existing, one that does not exist for Europe. Common consensus of political values is still a lie propagated at the start of each successive re-drafting of European Treaties.

So why do pro-integrationists and Federalists continue to propagate the lie of the avoidance of war? It is not immediately clear. There was no war in Europe from 1945 to set-up of the European Economic Community in 1957. Thus the existence of peace cannot be co-dependent on the existence of a political Union or a common market. Yet this simple fact is ignored on so many European politics courses at Universities, for the sake of furthering ideology based on personal sentiment of the course convener. Many of these are quasi-socialists, who understand that if the all the states of Europe were to shift to significantly to the left, the possibility of a quasi-socialist overlord based on redistributionist economics would be possible. The supposed virtue of this is based on an economically blind belief that the best way for a society or person to become wealthy is to be given the wealth of others rather than to create it for itself or himself. This is why there was the creation of the social chapter for the European Union, and the welfare competence granted to the EU under Lisbon. This is to pave the way for control of EU law-making by a redistributive consensus, being very feasible considering that this is the predominant political ideal in most European states.

The usefulness of this lie of avoidance of war is clear. It engages one of the worst parts of our psyche: fear. We have to stay in the project for the fear of our lives, and the numerous emotionally susceptible and politically misled fall for it. It is also a common currency for lazy thinking, amongst both undergraduates and post-graduates, at Universities I have taught in. A broader reading of history suggests that what really is to fear is continued integration without consent. To realise that the entering into of Lisbon with a false second referendum in Ireland, and the absence of one in the UK, is an affront to democratic decency. In 1648 a political device was created to free men from the tyranny of a supra-national overlord, constituted primarily by the diet regime of the Papacy. This device was the nation-state, a vehicle for expression of identity, which is not only linked to but as important as individual liberty. Three-hundred and fifty years later it is at threat from disingenuous machinations of those in search for power and control based on their personal ideology as much as that which dogged the Catholic church and the Hapsburgs in their lust for European power centuries earlier. Those political machinations, including lack of local representation and closed door decision-making, led to the bloodiest war in human history (the Thirty Years War) through which almost 70% of the population of Europe was wiped out.

Copyright Abhijit P.G. Pandya 2011
Copyright Birkenhead Society 2011.

Muslims who can’t take a joke are ‘cultural terrorists’ – Shame on those that have attacked Mr Donnelly

2011-02-02T19:09:00.001-08:00

What are two of the finest things about British culture? Yes we have so many to choose from, but to sample a couple let me tell you about (i) our humour and (ii) freedom of speech. Yes, for several hundred years the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh and the English all got along, despite their differences, in small part due to their ability to poke fun, demonise and ridicule one another. And they did this without taking offence and realising, whatever one might say, that being insensitive to quips and insults is a sign of maturity. Then came Islam and we find that no small minority of it has a serious grudge to bear with these key two aspects of our culture, to the point of trying to destroy them.

Let me give you a ludicrous example. A few days ago AV voting campaigner Ben Donnelly was dismissed from his campaigning post for a statement on the internet site twitter that said: ‘Says in the Holy Qu’ran the Prophet used to get his neighbours to vote by AV which of his 4 wives he’d shag each night’. One may have to pause at this point to smirk (assuming one is not being watched). Now here is the interesting part: Labour MP Khalid Mahmood called for Donnelly to be referred to the police. Yes, the Labour MP has a job in the mother of all Parliaments in Britain. The Parliament that supposedly embodies the spirit of freedom through which it was formed in the 17th C, by Parliamentarians fighting against a tyrant King. Doesn’t this incident not just show what sort of imbeciles now line its green benches? Another Mr. Shafiq, the Chief Executive of the Ramadan foundation, described the joke as ‘disgusting’ . A spokesman for the Yes campaign joined in saying that these comments will not be accepted. So the ‘cultural terrorism’ begins. This term being used to signify an unjustifiable, arbitrary, interference and curbing of key aspects of our own culture, by these cultural terrorists who have no idea how important free-speech (and related humour and mockery) is to the functioning of a tolerant free society. The latter, with no irony, is so important for minority groups to live and contribute to life here. This, of course, is not the first of this sort of incident.

If there is any action to be taken it is to defend our culture against this small band of minority cultural terrorists who seek to use their own individual sensitivities to silence us all, that time is now. This is before this gets any worse and this non-physical violence against our values is permitted to continue to grow. As Karl Popper pointed out in one of his books (The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato):‘Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them’.

Within this statement of Popper’s is the rationale to fight anyone who behaves like a tyrant, curbing the freedoms of others for his own individual comfort. We must stop that most intolerant of beings who can’t stand others poking fun at him, his football club, his religion or the way he fries his eggs by telling him that we won’t put with his childish sensitivities. So many intolerant bullies get away with this, often playing the victim card for themselves. We must have the courage to say please, please grow up and join the 21st Century and be free. If our MP’s and Government won’t do this- we have little chance of preserving this salami slicing of our freedom and culture by these cultural terrorists.

Can the public please wake-up and stand-up for our freedom of speech and humour before accusations using that most broadest and Gestapoeque term ‘Islamophobia’ turn our country into a police-state from a free tolerant society? Wake-up and support us in UKIP, who will go where the other political idiots can’t due to their appeasement and myopia on this most pressing of issues.

Copyright Abhijit P.G. Pandya 2011 (3rd Feb 2011)
Copyright Birkenhead Society 2011.

Consecutive Conservative and Labour Governments betrayed Britain’s young Muslims when they chose segregation over assimilation.

2011-01-25T02:45:00.000-08:00

It is not in the national interest, nor in the interest of minority groups to encourage victimisation in the manner Baroness Warsi did last week. Young Muslims particularly, though not exclusively, of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent have it difficult enough to integrate and assimilate without Warsi making them feel like victims, for political gain. To encourage victimisation comes at the cost of precluding important self-fault finding, in this instance, for both individuals and the state. Without this it is not possible to deal with the plight of isolation that exists amongst some Muslim youths and a chunk of Britain’s Muslim’s community.

Some of us have been fortunate enough to go to a school where we have had to go to chapel everyday, including formally for an elongated service on Sundays. This may not ,necessarily, have given one concrete faith, but it may grant an intuitive insight into the history and culture of England. That religion has shaped national life for centuries is a historical understatement. Even a simple appreciation of ecclesiastical history can facilitate one to understand that it was a unique occurrence both in England, and the West, that political liberty came about on the back of religious liberty. Unfortunately, some young Muslims, confined to areas where they can only meet other isolated members of the same faith there are few opportunities for insight into the world beyond their uni-cultural communes. (The huge irony of multiculturalism is that it creates large areas where only one foreign culture persists. It is also an amazingly coincidental and useful structure for Labour Party campaigning!). For many young Muslims the opportunity to grasp and learn more about the terrific history of this Isles is left to an improbable outcome, particularly now that schools no longer teach British history and culture. This will no doubt persist ethnic minority isolation for the foreseeable future. With the disparity in knowledge of history and culture some young Muslims are ill-equipped to face the world, having being put at a disadvantage to those from other social backgrounds. With this lack of knowledge go so many related opportunities in employment and social life. It is no wonder that so many have no sense of belonging or affiliation, when marginalisation has occurred through the simple omission of knowledge.

There is no irony in the fact that Enoch Powell noted this possibility in the 1960s. After all, he had a profound understanding of subcontinent culture and languages. It is not difficult to be moved by the passage in Simon Heffer’s biography that describes Powell’s Indian attendees in tears when he is leaving the sub-continent. Few had gone so to such lengths to understand so deeply its variances and similarities with Britain (Warren Hastings is the only name that springs immediately to mind- but there are others). It is a sign of the mediocrity of human judgment that Powell has become so demonised (often out of political necessity, than pure malice). This, worryingly persistent, misjudgement demonstrates how far British politic has yet to mature on dealing with truths that for unreasoned and meagre minds seem subconsciously so unpalatable. The lack of leadership away from emotional sentimentalism only further clouds judgment. Our capacity to misjudge Powell, is almost equalled to our misjudgement of the isolationist tendencies that multiculturalism can foster. The plight of many migrants today that Powell was so palpably concerned with is a direct result of failures to actively assimilate and the consistent indifference to the relationship between numbers and the rate of integration. Without a clear method to integrate, rather than isolate, the problems continue to exacerbate as their numbers grow in many parts of the country. Alas, so few people actually know that Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ was about discrimination to immigrants, as opposed to sectarian strife.

The provenance of that speech lies in the story of difficulties of immigration; how hard it was for one foreigner, at the heart of the quoted story, arriving in Ancient Rome, to fit in. Powell was, perhaps, a little selfish- he could have elaborated more rather than leaving the point to be unravelled by only the most cerebral. Though his message was clear, it was also pessimistic (unsurprisingly so as Powell was Nietzchean in outlook), and realistic as to what could and could not be achieved through a Christian spirit of warmth and welcome; even if this could be summoned on mass. The fact that our Isles have not quite been able to do this, mitigates only very partially the failed policies of consecutive Labour and Conservative governments to ensure restriction of numbers and even distribution of new-comers to ensure assimilation. Going back on this front now is almost improbable. However the remedy for isolation of young Muslims still exists: this is to encourage integration. But who, barring perhaps UKIP, would dare say this in the current political climate? The approach at present is to waive the problem; to use that ultimate laissez-faire abdication of responsibility word: ‘multiculturalism’. The word is not just a disincentive to assimilate- it makes it a right to isolate oneself in another land without even attempting to learn its history and culture. How can one then get on with and even be as one with its people? Of all people, Powell understood the daftness of this as he sat in India, sweating, in the midday sun some eighty years ago, mastering his Urdu and rendering local theology comprehensible to himself.

Copyright Abhijit P.G. Pandya 2011.
Copyright Birkenhead Society 2011.

My dear Baroness Warsi- Is it hightime to revive the Medieval Starchamber?

2011-01-20T11:16:00.001-08:00

Let us assume that Baroness Warsi's comments, last night, are not gratituitous aLet us assume that Baroness Warsi's comments, last night, are not gratituitous piffle, but of real substance. Afterall, why make such statements from the altar of authority if you are not going to act upon them? It is all too rare thesedays too see politicians goading the public, accusing them of imaginary prejudices- particularly on issues of race or creed. So what ought the Baroness to do next? If you are willing to accuse the public of an imaginary prejudice, go further act upon it and put an end to it Baroness, please. The use of the Starchamber in the Medieval period was one of our darkest periods of history. Secretly facts and inquisitions would be read about persons unbeknown to them, and sentences passed until only at the last moment the person convicted would find himself burnt, hung or quartered.

Baroness Warsi's comments yesterday demonstrates that she, or the Conservative Party, perhaps, might find it tempting to turn the Select Committee on Islamophobia into a secret inquistorial process reminiscient of the, thankfully, abolished medieval court. In a period of time in our country where Muslim terrorists have allowed Governments to create secret tribunals why not this further erosion of our civil liberties? One must, of course, begin with some common-sense to help her. So my first question is how does a bunch of politicians and their aides demonstrate what a 'phobia' is? Are they psychiatrists? No of course not, but they will somehow discuss persons who are and instances where some intangible form of prejudice has occurred to demonstrate this phobia.

Following Baroness Warsi's example, perhaps, the committee ought to further justify its proper use of tax-payer's money to bug dinner tables up and down the country. It may decided to address the so called 'Isamophobia' too- Why not do this properly with the use of modern science? Or would this make this ridiculous select committee even less Kafaseque/Starchamber-like? On one reading a phobia is an irrational fear. Is it right to irrationally fear muslims, considering that it is the only faith from which terrorists have propogated terror, in the recent times, for the sake of religion itself? If that is not a 'phobia' then classifying such feelings as such must be secretly inquisitorial or star-chamber esque- surely? Further some aspects of Sharia law include wife-beating that are directly opposed to our understanding of a woman's equal standing in society. It is also clear that the idea of a liberal society, (i.e. one that drinks, procreates freely, values choice and autonomy without the decree of theocractic supersition) is wrong in some Islamic eyes. Does this mean that libertarians (of which I am not one) should also have a phobia of Islam? Or is this a natural, justified, fear to their way of life?

And who justifies this- some unelected select committee, or some moronic Chairwoman of the Conservative Party who feels that it is wrong to have a phobia of a faith that aspects of which are so fundamentally opposed to the British way of life (and I don't mean here just munching on an odd bit of bacon sandwich) that people ought not to be concerned. One might make the case the otherway. One might say that only unpatriotic dimwits are not concerned by the rise of some Islamic practices in the country. That this no different from being concerned about Hindu wishes for open-air cremations, that coat the countryside with hazardous ash. But my dear countrymen and women, think not this. Or the Gestapo in the form of Baroness Warsi will be out to get you. Watch your tongue at supper tonight. Dare not say, whilst supping your wine, wouldn't Muslims enjoy this rather fine, though possibly on the turn, Merlot? There are pressing questions here for the Baroness too:

From where does the search for Islamophobes begin and the inquisition of traditional culturally minded patriots end? And what is, as far this preposterous select committee is concerned, the boundary between two intangible terms: 'phobia' and 'paranoia'? I don't know, but I do defer to the Baroness's ability to read people's minds. She, I am sure, will be most useful to both Committee and Country. I am sure that her comments won't encourage, for example, the victim culture in, a few, Muslims that can be so shallow and a so easlily overreached barrier to integration, if only they could be helped with the right leadership. It is time for our Baroness to go back to the drawing-board, think-again, and wonder if the best-way for those Muslims that feel ostracised, that can't assimilate, to integrate is to encourage proactive integration into mainstream national culture, heritage and values-rather than mindless apologetics. These include that most of British of things: *Not to make unsubstantiated incriminations, as her statement has. Those values have been here, on our Island, far longer than her or any form of Islam.

Copyright Abhijit P.G.Pandya 2011
Copyright Birkenhead Society 2011iffle, but of real substance. Afterall, why make such statements from the altar of authority if you are not going to act upon them? It is all too rare thesedays too see politicians goading the public, accusing them of imaginary prejudices- particularly on issues of race or creed. So what ought the Baroness to do next? If you are willing to accuse the public of an imaginary prejudice, go further act upon it and put an end to it Baroness, please. The use of the Starchamber in the Medieval period was one of our darkest periods of history. Secretly facts and inquisitions would be read about persons unbeknown to them, and sentences passed until only at the last moment the person convicted would find himself burnt, hung or quartered.

Baroness Warsi's comments yesterday demonstrates that she, or the Conservative Party, perhaps, might find it tempting to turn the Select Committee on Islamophobia into a secret inquistorial process reminiscient of the, thankfully, abolished medieval court. In a period of time in our country where Muslim terrorists have allowed Governments to create secret tribunals why not this further erosion of our civil liberties? One must, of course, begin with some common-sense to help her. So my first question is how does a bunch of politicians and their aides demonstrate what a 'phobia' is? Are they psychiatrists? No of course not, but they will somehow discuss persons who are and instances where some intangible form of prejudice has occurred to demonstrate this phobia.

Following Baroness Warsi's example, perhaps, the committee ought to further justify its proper use of tax-payer's money to bug dinner tables up and down the country. It may decided to address the so called 'Isamophobia' too- Why not do this properly with the use of modern science? Or would this make this ridiculous select committee even less Kafaseque/Starchamber-like? On one reading a phobia is an irrational fear. Is it right to irrationally fear muslims, considering that it is the only faith from which terrorists have propogated terror, in the recent times, for the sake of religion itself? If that is not a 'phobia' then classifying such feelings as such must be secretly inquisitorial or star-chamber esque- surely? Further some aspects of Sharia law include wife-beating that are directly opposed to our understanding of a woman's equal standing in society. It is also clear that the idea of a liberal society, (i.e. one that drinks, procreates freely, values choice and autonomy without the decree of theocractic supersition) is wrong in some Islamic eyes. Does this mean that libertarians (of which I am not one) should also have a phobia of Islam? Or is this a natural, justified, fear to their way of life?

And who justifies this- some unelected select committee, or some moronic Chairwoman of the Conservative Party who feels that it is wrong to have a phobia of a faith that aspects of which are so fundamentally opposed to the British way of life (and I don't mean here just munching on an odd bit of bacon sandwich) that people ought not to be concerned. One might make the case the otherway. One might say that only unpatriotic dimwits are not concerned by the rise of some Islamic practices in the country. That this no different from being concerned about Hindu wishes for open-air cremations, that coat the countryside with hazardous ash. But my dear countrymen and women, think not this. Or the Gestapo in the form of Baroness Warsi will be out to get you. Watch your tongue at supper tonight. Dare not say, whilst supping your wine, wouldn't Muslim's enjoy this rather fine, though possibly on the turn, Merlot? There are pressing questions here for the Baroness too:

From where does the search for Islamophobes begin and the inquisition of traditional culturally minded patriots end? And what is, as far this preposterous select committee is concerned, the boundary between two intangible terms: 'phobia' and 'paranoia'? I don't know, but I do defer to the Baroness's ability to read people's minds. She, I am sure, will be most useful to both Committee and Country. I am sure that her comments won't encourage, for example, the victim culture in, a few, Muslims that can be so shallow and a so easlily overreached barrier to integration, if only they could be helped with the right leadership. It is time for our Baroness to go back to the drawing-board, think-again, and wonder if the best-way for those Muslims that feel ostracised, that can't assimilate, to integrate is to encourage proactive integration into mainstream national culture, heritage and values. These include that most of British of things: *Not to make unsubstantiated incriminations, as her statement has. Those values have been here, on our Island, far longer than her or any form of Islam.

Copyright Abhijit P.G.Pandya 2011
Copyright Birkenhead Society 2011

Does Anthony Blunt make the case to pull out of 'Additional Protocol 13' of the European Convention of Human Rights?

2011-01-02T00:09:00.001-08:00

Mrs. Thatcher was an extraordinary Prime Minister for a number of reasons. Perhaps signs were already there at the start of her reign as Prime Minister when she uncovered the acts of one of Britain’s greatest all-time villains to the public and removed his knighthood and privileges. One of her first acts was the unmasking of Anthony Blunt, whose wartime treachery was deliberately kept hidden from the public to prevent outcry, more in relation to the sustained cover-up than treachery, by an institutional establishment that was too embarrassed to reveal the misfits of one of their own. For years Anthony Blunt, traitor and devil incarnate, sat in Somerset House in knowledge that he got away with the help of tacit connivance of friends in higher places. He sat in the old navy office, never once recanting his treachery, as Surveyor’s of the King’s Pictures (the man in charge of the Royal Family’s art collection). He had at his fingertips one of the most mesmerising art collections in the country. This collection includes some fantastic period pieces such as Canaletto’s 18th Century portrait of Venice, with its remarkable gaunt and thinly laden depiction of key architecture posturing amicably behind a vast encompass of river. Other highlights include a Rembrandt self-portrait, and the ‘Adoration of the Magi’ by Ricci and Lorrain’s exquisite capturing of Italian countryside in the late evening.

Prior to enjoying such delights and preserving them for the nation, during the Second World War Mr. Blunt, a distant cousin of the Queen, was into far more insidious schemes. His main activity was passing off a significant quantity of secret information about military and confidential activity to the Soviets. He was engaged in this prior to the Nazi breach of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. Thus, in essence, assisting Germany following Britain declaration of war against her later that year. Following this he passed significant British intelligence regarding German army and navy codes to the Russians during his time as an MI5 officer from 1940 onwards. All these activities would placed him in the clear possibility of prosecution, and the death sentence, had they been fully revealed at the time. That he did this during a time when not only Britain was under threat from invasion, but losing lives at war is wholly disgusting. Yet despite knowledge of all this no full investigation was undertaken, nor any prosecution pursued that might have lead to an appropriate
(death) sentence for almost four decades following the end of the war.

This issue, of national betrayal and the death sentence, is just as pressing today. Until Tony Blair removed Britain’s right to exercise the death penalty for traitors in the time of war by signing up to a specific part of the European Convention for Human Rights in 1997 (Additional Protocol 13) it was still possible for us to execute national traitors who put the lives of many, if not all of us, at risk. Young British Islamic radicals so often finding their real homes, thanks to multiculturalism, fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan could have all received the chop. The death penalty could have acted as a disincentive and deterrent for crazy British nationals to wage war against their own soldiers when they are fighting against a foreign state. However, it seems quite bizarre that this optional part of European Legislation would be voluntarily signed up to without adequate ascertainment of the restrictions it would place on the ability of states to protect themselves in a time of war. Nor is it clear what benefits to foreign policy ratifying the Additional Protocol 13 will serve. More bizarre is the current silence from Conservative back-benchers, stolen into silence by their power craven leader to force a limping coalition to walk, at present on this issue.

Can anyone in the House of Commons dare to open the debate on Additional Protocol 13? Or have we all bayed into the silence by thinking that the death penalty is always, under all circumstances, a nasty thing AND that it ok for European Law to curtail our right to have it during war?

Abhijit P.G. Pandya Copyright 2011.
Copyright Birkenhead Society 2011.

Radical Islam in Britain- Is there ever more of a need of inductive reasoning than when reason has been abandoned into the foray of Multi-Culturalism?

2010-12-21T18:02:00.001-08:00

A not so unfamiliar, though still rare and sad tale these days: A young Muslim boy grows-up to become an Islamic terrorist. At some point before he became a terrorist he was a mere Muslim. During the phase of being a Muslim, or before it- if that is relevant, he had occasion to question his faith. Or, if he did not have occasion, he had not been given the fundamental faculties of reason, nor had he knowledge of the benefits of applying to reason to self-assessment. Like so many people of faith, irrespective of type, he failed to realise the fundamentals of human autonomy that renders faith a matter of choice, not absolute decree.

This example may be possible in an orthodox Islamic state, but it is by no means likely. But what if this was done in a modern Western democratic state? What if it was done in say the state that fathered the Enlightenment and fostered democracy around the world? Would at some point there not be a detailed, carefully questioning, inquiry into cause? Would not the rational question of intervention come into play? Further, though not vindicating his actions, could assigning fault of this to the state prevent such similar action in the future? Let us go further into detail of this particular Western democratic state. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that it had a national religion that is Christianity. And let’s say for further argument, that it had a Head of state whom was also the Head of this religion. Let’s also say that in the entire stretch of the 20th Century there was no incident of mass religious violence or terrorism between Christian groups in this hypothetical state. Induction would lead us to say that Christianity does not cause violence in this state, in recent times, against other Christians (irrespective of denomination) on the basis of religion. Either it does not permit it and this is sanctionable, or people who perpetrate violence who are Christians against other Christians are not motivated by religion. It would be wise for anyone seeking a correlation between religion and violence to have a look at this case as an example of some accord in this context.

Let us take our inquiry further in our hypothetical state. Let it also be taken as fact that in this place there is no violence between non-religious persons in recent times on the basis of established religion. These three configurations would lead to, perhaps, an unpalatable conclusion: (i) people who are not religious are not generally interested in the propagation of religious violence; (ii) Christians are not generally interested in religious violence against one another on the basis of Christianity; (iii) for some reason people who commit terrorism are latching on to Islam- BUT it is by no means clear whether Islam is causing terrorism.

A detailed analysis of the third would very likely corroborate it. As not all muslims are terrorists, it is not Islam but the supposed believer of it that is likely to be responsible for religious violence. But why would he or she do this? The root answer to this is not in Islam, but rather in something else: ‘Group theory’. The muslim terrorist does not have access to something that other members of society who do not propagate religious violence do. Perhaps, Christians and atheists have access to a context for religion within which Islamic terrorists do not. This context must render religious violence otiose. What could it be? And what should the state do, if anything, to provide it?

To cut an elongating analysis short the context is ‘Not Multiculturalism’. The state must stop encouraging multiculturalism and re-enforcing it. What I am saying in blunt terms is that: Islam is not responsible for Islamic terrorism in Britain BUT multiculturalism is. For the radical Islamist (whose motivations for violence are conviction driven above and beyond the common criminal), the boundaries of the role of religion in the modern world are simply unknown and irrelevant. To the fundamentalist religion is everything. But the last three hundred years of British history have been in exactly the opposite direction: telling us that religion isn’t everything. History tells us that when coupled with reason, religion can reduce its inherent propensities to harm when it is in the hand of a zealous human-being.

‘Multi-culturalism’ in a state with many religions and different cultures will inevitably lead to segregation due to the very nature of religion to denounce, on a non-empirical basis, all others. It also isolates old world theology, from modern world philosophy. Without removing multi-culturalism, which prevents assimilation from orthodox theology to secular pluralism, the main-bulk of us in society who understand that religion is a belief and nothing more (and that this is not related to its validity) will be at risk from the odd zealot. Further, where there are plural religions in play it encourages identity with belief rather than nation state or our common humanity. This enervates the idea that a man can be judged for his actions rather than beliefs (and works to engender the opposite). The former is at the heart of a state that believes in rationalism and modernity.

Copyright Abhijit P.G. Pandya 2010
Copyright Birkenhead Society 2010

The European Union’s destructive plan to End bilateralism and the right of States to have trade and investment policy.

2010-12-21T08:42:00.000-08:00

The EU’s new investment policy, permitted under the Lisbon Treaty, will end the ability of the UK to negotiate bilateral investment treaties and related trade deals on its own. It will thus stop us from negotiating with other states to lure businesses and services to the UK, and selling the bonus points of the UK as a place to invest. It will thus result in a severe decline of foreign investment, which provides much needed employment in poorer areas of our country.

When this policy becomes an EU Regulation it will prevent any member state having a preferential investment and trade agreement over another. Thus, if the UK has a better investment agreement than Germany with India, it will nullify that advantage. Following the successful passage of the regulation all investment treaties will only be able to be signed by the EU. Bilateral trade agreements will follow suit. All foreign investment policy will then be exclusive competence of the EU.

This is the end of sole control over foreign trade and investment policy for the UK and any related trade advantages it has in the global market over the EU and other states. As these agreements are reciprocal, it will significantly undermine Britain's competitiveness in the global market as the UK will no longer have control over protecting its businesses overseas. This also means that if non-EU states do not sign an investment agreement with the EU, British businesses will have no protection as Britain will not be able to sign any investment treaties on its own. British business will either then avoid those states, resources and markets or go there under serious risk that their business will be nationalised by the state. Thus some businesses may cease to trade overseas as a result of lack of protection that investment treaties provide.

Because the UK will no longer be able to have a bilateral investment treaty (this is a reciprocal agreement for both states to encourage and protect investments) the same investments that would normally come to the UK would now go anywhere in the EU. We would not be allowed to give any preferential treatment to lure businesses here, and as a result it would mean the end of the policy of foreign businesses to come in to deal with unemployment.

It is likely that the EU will then legislative to send these businesses to the more needy or other parts where it is cheaper to make the EU to attract them.

A definite loss for the UK as our unemployment does not match those of other parts of the EU nor do we have the cheapest platform from which businesses can operate. The foreign direct investment economic stimulus will be done on an EU wide basis and not on a national level.

It remains extraordinary that so many members of the leading political parties were blind to the enlargement of EU competence in Lisbon to investment and what the effects were likely to be.

Copyright Abhijit P.G. Pandya 21.12. 2010
Copyright Birkenhead Society 21.12.2010.

If you don’t believe water-boarding convicted terrorists is right; then you simply haven’t joined the real world.

2010-11-09T13:03:00.000-08:00

Professor Sir Nigel Rodley argued on BBC News this evening that President Bush’s admission of torture should be followed by a criminal prosecution. That torture is quite simply wrong and ‘they will torture us if we torture them’. Excuse me Professor, I think you haven’t quite grasped the situation: They want to kill us. Whatever their reasons for killing us or torturing us, it’s not to do with our water-boarding them (in fact the perceived barbarity of the enemy is to be respected and honoured historically in some warlike/terrorist perpetuating cultures). This demonstrates how far the human rights dreamers are away from the reality of the war. They want to kill us for being Western, economically successful and believing in democracy. This jealousy and often base hate is masked in all sorts of dissimulations (it is both the prerogative and habit of evil to deceive), E.g. Israel’s acts in Gaza, the war in Iraq, the presence of Western troops in Afghanistan. Unfortunately it is often the courage to do brutal acts that perpetuates the survival of civilisation over barbarity. While evil exists, preservation of the greater good is paramount through often visceral courage. President Bush, thank god, had the courage to do this and not live in a dangerous subjective utopia that leads to elimination.

Professor Rodley, sitting in his warm room in his university (like many a human rights lawyer) needs to understand a few very fundamental things:

1. The world is very horrible place with lots of nasty people that want to destroy his way of life. His ability to sit there warm and safe to dream and abstractly pontificate in his office is based on the existence of the nation state.
2. The nation state has to be protected, without it we can’t dream of the non-sense of human rights or the commonsense of liberty.
3. That human rights can destroy the nation-state, by giving unmeritorious people rights through being universal and thus economically crippling Governments. It can also do so by weakening us in the face of those who are our enemies.
4. That the people whom we torture are fighting to end all talk of human rights and liberty, and if they win the human rights lawyers will either be censored or, most likely as the Taliban have shown with respect to dissent, killed.

The obvious advice for Professor Rodley is to follow President Bush and self-preserve. It is self-evident, to all but those who have lost touch with common-sense and reality, that preserving life and liberty has to come before the ability to dream.

Copyright Abhijit P.G. Pandya 2010.
Copyright Birkenhead Society 2010.

David Cameron failed in Brussels on Friday because he doesn’t realise that they need us more than we need them.

2010-10-31T08:19:00.001-07:00

In Prime Ministers’ Questions on Wednesday (27/11/10) David Cameron arrogantly affused a brief narrative regarding Lady Thatcher’s extraordinary EU rebate negotiations in 1984. After hours of heated posturing European leaders then gave in to Lady Thatcher’s simple argument that Britain’s economic contribution to the Common Agricultural Policy was disproportionate to the benefits brought home by the EEC. So Cameron had set himself for his Lady Thatcher moment, forcing us to find an assessment of whether his self-drawn comparison was justified. He came home after Friday evening in Brussels not just empty handed (he mitigated loss rather than acquired benefit) but also without discernible intended impact of reducing the increase to the EU budget.

I don’t know who was briefing the Prime Minister, but in the last few weeks when Europe was working out how to entrench a huge deposit scheme for national bail-outs, how off the wall his thinking of reducing a budget increase of 6% next year was- and simply how hard he would have to fight in this climate to get it. In simple terms while we are cutting costs back home, Europe is looking for increased contributions for its new monolith insurance policy, which like so many other self-proposed schemes carries with it no Treaty based mandate. The Prime Minister, without being able to effectively understand the eminence of Britain’s position in Europe and the importance of our current contributions to any of these causes, failed to go in there with a plan of reduced exposure to Europe in line with cuts that many domestic areas were facing. He thus did not play the old; ‘we would like to do this, but it is not sitting with what are doing domestically- hence my hands are tied’. Unfortunately, even this evaded the PM.

Lady Thatcher, of course, would have been far fiercer and stronger than that: I suspect she would still be in Brussels this evening, bullish if she had not got what she had wanted. As a result of this the Prime Minister has left a gaping disparity in the Comprehensive Spending Review set out by his Chancellor. I, for one, am still not convinced that those that will lose their public sector jobs at home will be happy that their jobs will be paying for policy development for bailouts for the future debt mismanaged Greeces of this world.

In the end the P.M. got the increase halved, yet an increase it still is. The policy disparity between domestic cuts and international expenditure caused by the upcoming UK contributions to the EU is no longer tenable. The EU expenditure is not negligible. UK’s net EU contributions will increase to £6.9 billion next year, roughly 6.5% of the NHS budget (the equivalent cost of prescriptions for the entire population for over a year or the cost of cancer treatment for the entire population for two years (Source: OHE 2009)). This makes reassessment of benefits of membership timely, as it genuinely affects life-style choices at home due its cost. The arguments thus move beyond self-government and preservation of democracy, to social needs of the UK population including national tax policy which impacts upon economic autonomy of the individual.

This self-assessment is particularly needed given the Lisbon Treaty endows the EU with the capacity to make treaties, making withdrawal now easier than ever. With the end of the Cold-war and growing global privatisation now bringing more and more sectors (and states) into the global market, Britain must branch its export/import circle far above and beyond the Eurozone. After all the Indians don’t speak French but English, and the advantage of bilateral trade increasingly moves us away from multilateralism into the bilateral realm of foreign economic policy. But beyond all this, the EU’s role in promoting global free trade is now questionably ‘redundant’. When the UK entered the EEC global tariffs were significantly high, and the GATT had yet to expand the areas of reduced tariffs now seen within the WTO. (The subsequent Tokyo and Uruguay rounds of world trade negotiations in the late 1970s and 1980s moved the world significantly towards global free trade in an unprecedented way). Now cost of exports and imports vis-à-vis tariffs are negligible, so that most areas of the world no longer have effective barriers to prevent trade. The rise of investment treaties in the last two decades (from over 50 to several thousand) has virtually ended the concept of market barriers. This renders benefits of exclusivity or preference to the Euro-zone for trade and investment dubious, and frees states from being ensconced in international institutions for trade to more global choices in line with global market liberalisation.

It is with this in mind, and with some developed choices in foreign economic policy that the P.M. should have faced the Brussels crowd on Friday evening. The most important thing that the PM should have noted: the UK contributes 13% of the EU budget (£13 billion 700 million Euros) –however, there are 27 member states. Some states contribute nothing. (Romania contributes nothing but still has 35 MEPs sitting in the European Parliament; Bulgaria contributes nothing but still has 18 MEPs sitting in the European Parliament- all able to vote on fiscal policy and expenditure which is based on the contributions of other states). The conclusion, my dear P.M., is simple: they need us more than we need them.

Copyright Abhijit P.G. Pandya 2010.
Copyright Birkenhead Society 2010.

Social mobility takes a kicking under the coalition

2010-10-10T19:44:00.000-07:00

How do you get social mobility? Two basic ingredients, as Lady Thatcher once noted, tell a man who doesn’t work why he should, and tell a man who works to work harder. The nation will benefit, as one will get that most needed of things at the moment, growth. That’s quite important in a recession. Now if you get rid of the carrots it does not matter how hard you beat the stick- it just won’t get the horse to water. Osborne and Cameron spoke of social mobility, they spoke of social justice. By attacking the middle classes, in a series of recent policy decisions, they have undermined both and – most importantly of all the impetus to seek the benefits of pursuing wealth. Or in different terms, the reasons why one should become middle class or richer middle class. So much for the party of aspiration; so much for the Government of fairness.
Let’s look at one recent daft policy to come out- the imbalanced removal of child benefit. It’s not that child benefit being removed that is so much of the problem; it is the nature of this particular policy that ought to cause concern. How can a mother who stays at home to nurture a child where the other parent works be left without the benefit and two parents who both work and might have almost double the salary keep it? The Chancellor’s perverse, disingenuous reason was that there will be some losers and he has to hit ‘every part of society’ (one should note that this an internal term used by the Conservative Party of deliberate reiterative psephology designed to take imaginary left wing voters to bed that do not actually exist). But does this mean that it should be irrational? Does that mean that you should try and trick your way out of an obvious blunder and assume the public are daft? And what of that most important of things: spending time with one’s child to ensure it is prepared for life, and it is supported fully through the vital years? This is particularly important in a time where people often work harder and longer, and see their children less. Parental support so important to a child’s success is being jeopardised through the message given by the Chancellor’s erroneous disparity.
The other policy to note is the real worry for social mobility. The decision to make wealthier graduates pay greater tuition fees, so that their lazier class mates can have an even more fun time at University bunking lessons, boozing continuously and getting a third. The harder you work at University, and the more difficult a course you choose (e.g. Economics, Law, Medicine) the more you will pay for others to do less. Utterly absurd. Take this example, when the best medical students will have the privilege of private practice in say surgery, possibly on Britain’s prestigious Harley Street, they will be paying for a third class flunker in theatre design at some unheard of institute. This will inspire us all Mr. Cameron. Well done. Surely only the mindless of egalitarians, or the mad, will see anything of value here.

Copyright Abhijit P.G. Pandya 2010.
Copyright Birkenhead Society 2010.

We must stop bashing bankers if we are to regenerate the economy.

2010-09-13T18:24:00.001-07:00

The response to the banking crisis, what to make of it. ‘It is all politics’ a London cabbie tells me. How right. What is more interesting is the meaning of this phrase. I have pondered over this for quite some time and have come to an obvious definition: 'When party interest starts to override national interest and invades choices and measures in Government'. The Conservative Party under Cameron is paralytically obsessed with image change to the degree that it is willing to become anything but anything resembling the Party in its most successful days in the 1980s and 1990s. Alas it is also abandoning tried and tested methods of economic stimulus.
The skill of managing image is to protect it whilst doing nasty things. However, by not being too good at doing that the coalition have thrown away a myriad of sensible policies that even smell slightly of Thatcherism. Therein goes the sensible policies of that period that restricted state intervention into the market, and finally incentivised large and small business. Whilst the papers (shame on them) obsess with £40 million given to the Chairman of Barclays (an absolute pittance in comparison to its annual turnover) Osborne has been bought by the leftish drivel of using the banking bonuses as a scapegoat for Labour’s economic mismanagement. Thus the new coalition, built on the desire for power over any integrity of political belief, now seeks to make all bank bonuses transparent. The treasury is preparing detailed legislation this week.

Yet what purpose this obvious public relations stunt is for is unclear, barring protecting the brand that is 'Cameron Tory'. Is the Conservative Party now trying to stimulate envy amongst the public through revealing high pay packages? What purpose does revealing private earnings serve? And why not stop with the banks, what about businesses that expand under the lure of bonuses and put at risk a large amount of employees? What is the consequence of impalatable bonuses (and is the impalatability merely based on quanta)? Does one have to give it to the Cameron Big Society project (Convenient initials ‘BS’)? As getting a bonus is a sign of commercial success, and commercial success if the driver of the British economy, the measure makes no sense. Taking a concrete position, would be to regulate certain areas of banking directly- a position that I would disagree with due to its ability to render British high risk banking products uncompetitive globally. This publicity stunt approach to the economy has got to stop, the state and not the Conservative Party must come first. Credit provided by the banks is the fuel of the economy. If we don’t incentivise risk in banking, then in simple terms, we won’t get growth and move out of the recession.

Abhijit P.G. Pandya
Copyright Birkenhead Society.

Easy Quiz: Who is the most racist MP in the House of Commons? Ans. Diane Abbott.

2010-06-09T16:01:00.001-07:00

This was an easy prize for Diane to win. Her whole life she has been paranoid about the colour of her skin and the colour of others. When she first entered the House of Commons bar as a young MP (seldom visited by women) she was stared at. Her paranoia and obsession with race told her that it was because she was black, not the more evident conclusion that she was one of the few female MPs. Who else could get away with the racialist sentiment uttered by her when she got stood for nomination for the Labour leadership: that she stood because the other candidates where white and male. Whilst Enoch Powell’s supposed concerns about race were justifiably limited to corresponding immigration issues, Abbott’s racism, excuse the pun, is black and white. She’s standing because she thinks it is important to have someone black standing, and on the nuanced theme that whites are inadequate. After all only blacks can understand blacks. And thinking that just can’t be racist can it? Maybe she needs to sit down one weekend and thoroughly read A.J. Ayer’s ‘Language Truth and Logic’ to see the inherent irrationality. Can politics delve any deeper into the gutter without fishing in the sewer in the way Abbott has? This is a woman who criticized people for sending their kids to private school and then did the same. Where is the criticism of character coming from the Labour Party when determining appropriateness for selection? Instead Harriet Harman emulated the stupidity of Abbott’s race card with the gender card; she was backing Abbott not because of the brilliance of Abbott’s mind or her agile debating skills. Rather Harman thinks it is important to have a woman in the race.

I think they both need some assistance from a policy expert to hone their approach: Why not find an unemployed black one-legged mentally disabled lesbian who has had a sex-change and make her a Labour MP. Do it quickly. Then get the whole party to support this person in a leadership bid once the new leader is announced. Come on Diane and Harriet-be a puritan stand up for what you believe, and at least have the integrity and decency to follow the argument through and put this into action. How else can minority protection be taken seriously in this country, if we don’t have minority representation for all?

Of course this is utterly absurd, but it is not a million miles away from what Harman and Abbot propagate. Diane Abbott does not stop her prejudice there, she also dislikes British culture. She asked her son, a British national, to go back to Ghana to discover his roots. What’s wrong with his country? If she becomes Labour leader those of us with an Irish grandparent will have to take time off to spend time wondering around Cork and breathing the clean air of Munster. Harold Wilson, former Labour leader and Oxford don at 21 must be turning in his grave.

Copyright Abhijit P.G. Pandya 2010
Copyright Birkenhead Society 2010

When the last flames of Erastianism become embers, the West will fall.

2010-06-01T20:09:00.000-07:00

The success of the West, from the philosophical basis of the free-market, mass literacy, democracy and fundamental freedoms are rooted in the single most important idea in the history of philosophy. This is to be found in the work of Erastus who began the shift away from the medieval world of arbitrary government and dictatorship of free will by theological superstition. He stated in significant contrast to his times that, in simplest terms, it was the state who was the final arbitrator of sin (right and wrong) and not the church. In essence it was for man to reason and decide what the yardsticks of acceptable conduct were. It placed the significantly onerous task of self-responsibility on the human-being and the governments he would create, by giving him the most important freedom of all: Reason. Of course we have struggled with the freedom that reason has given us, and the victory of saving man from the darker parts of himself is far from being won. What is, however, of significant concern in Britain today is how our politics has begun to support the irrational- how the sharper swords of intelligence have given way to emotion, and how emotion has confounded both common-sense and sensibility.

The clearest example of the Erastian yard-stick in a democracy is the level of detailed debate that politicians are capable of delivering, and the public are capable of engaging in, during an election. In the 2010 UK General Election, the Erastian short-comings lay with the leaders not the people. The critical signs of politics being rules by emotion rather than intelligence were the following issues raised to the national agenda: Climate Change (ruled by scientific consensus, not fact); International Development (ruled by the emotion of charity not by the propagation of the ideal of self-responsibility. In any event, ludicrous in a time of significant budget-deficit); Equality espoused by the Conservatives (not understanding that this is the right to prevent others from doing better than oneself); Social mobility (not appreciating that one needs a very large state apparatus to do this, the cost of which is in unaffordable, and that it advocates the abdication of self-responsibility at its very core); multi-culturalism and diversity (words that will lead first to the destruction of identity, and, following from this, of the nation state). (That the link between the word 'diversity' and the words: 'diversification', 'alienation', 'separation' and 'segregation' leading to a lack of social cohesion are not seen by the media is quite surprising).

We have come to difficult waters in the UK. Unless we are willing to speak the supposedly unspeakable, our heritage will be lost and with it our sense of nationhood. Courage is needed, as well as the strength to frown upon and despise cowardice when the spirit of 'Reason' is at threat in public debate. I recall a splendid passage in Heffer’s majestic biography of Enoch Powell. Powell attended a meeting of the Conservative One Nation group in 1950, where the odious Heath and the mercurial Macleod were present. Powell stated unequivocally, ‘that there was no such thing as social justice’. It was crystal clear then to him, as it should be now to all of us, that such a concept simply cannot be compatible with a meritocracy. Further, that without meritocracy one cannot get competition and a free-market based democracy. So what does the Conservative Party do when unable, due to post 1997 emasculation, to intellectually defeat Blair’s egalitarian (the opposite of merit) social justice model? It allows a former abysmal Party leader, Duncan-Smith to form ‘the Centre for Social Justice’ and use it as a back-bone for Conservative Party policy-making. The ghosts of the concrete socialists; Cripps, Gaitskell and Dalton; all laugh from their graves.

Cameron has wonderfully started off this coalition with a unique duplicity of moral vision. He proposed the 55% vote entrenchment of his Government for a fixed term to shore up the failings of the Conservative Manifesto in not getting a workable number of seats. He must have been reading a biography of Robert Mugabe when he thought of this. He then has the sheer idiocy to say that David Laws is ‘a good and honourable man’ for stealing £40,000 of tax-payers money for the character flaw of insecurity. Yes Laws stole because he was obsessed with what people thought of him. And as Cameron's PR experience informs him, it is right, just and 'honourable' to be concerned of public perception, so much so that it great that one can admit this publicly. It so evidently, so Reasonably, offers a valid excuse to wrongdoing. This is a leader who has little grasp of logic, and one whom massaging public relations- from whatever rationality, is more important than thinking through the rationality of so doing. It is thus clear that from manifesto to politics in practice that the Conservative Party will offer very little different, expenses included, from New Labour.

The staring road to reason is to talk about the very issues that lay at the heart of Britain’s problems. It is to speak the unspeakable, the impalatable, that which is most difficult to stomach. It is to reason things through. To not do as Duncan-Smith did, spend thousands of pounds in a centre for social justice, delivering a paper on social mobility that does not deal with skills training or employment building. It is to understand that a clear figure, a cap, is needed to put immigration under control to preserve our heritage and identity. To road to reason and honesty is to admit that multi-culturalism was responsible for the 7/7 attacks and British born youths fighting against the armed forces in Afghanistan. Unfortunately on the present course the Erastian spirit is far from our political agenda. Without reason we could not have had created the modern world, and we can only have a democracy which comprises banter based on fear, control based on spin and PR, and emotion. On our current course, despairingly, common-sense will be spoken in the impossible climate after lunacy has taken grip. If we are not already there…

Copyright Abhijit P.G Pandya 2010
Copyright Birkenhead Society 2010

Irresponsible international relations prejudging Israel over the gaza flotilla.

2010-05-31T16:37:00.001-07:00

In international law, it is up to a state to police its internal waters as they are a part of its territory. Furthermore, by extension in international law states can act, at their discretion to police incoming vessels. Where a vessel continues on its path into a state, a state can legitimately use force. This is a similar rule to the right of hot-pursuit where states can sink ships that leave their internal waters where there is a (subjective) possibility of a threat or crime regarding their sovereignty (see Professor Malcolm Shaw's colossal work on International Law, 5th Ed, p.549). The real concern for international relations is not Israel's act, but the reaction of several states and non-state entities before the facts came to light. A classic example of this is the Egyptian President's uttering that Israel, 'had excessively used force'. How he can ascertain what is excess without any regard to the nature of the incident or the threat posed by the ship is really quite astonishing. This is important as there is a generic international paranoia leading to prejudice every time Israel is involved in an incident using military force out of the confines of its territory. Peace is never achievable when minds are gorged with passions and prejudice. Often the first step towards peaceful relations is realising when passions and prejudices begin and reason ends. Understanding that boundary and erring on the side of reason and caution will lead to a far safer and harmonious world. That this is not realised as demonstrated by the reactions of states means that international public order (accord between states) is on slippery footing. Historically, the international community is in serious trouble where leaders of states throw logic out of the window and breathe only on the emotion in the air. These statements are indicative of the gap in maturity in international relations that needs to be overcome, before any progress can be made. My concern is that these statements were made before any of the facts were raised. Thus they are reflective of predetermined positions on Israel, or in simpler words: Prejudice. Thus the Russians claimed - 'a violation of international law by Israel', where it is quite feasible that the law is on the side of Israel.  Iran - 'this is maritime terrorism', despite the fact that the states have a right to protect their internal waters and a right to determine who comes into their territory. Far worse is the following language used immediately after the incident by the following: The Turkish Prime Minister stating that 'this is state terrorism', whatever that means. Hezbollah - 'a premeditated crime against humanity'. Hamas - 'Muslims must now rise up'. PLO Abbas - 'this was a massacre'. What these latter entities should have done is followed the more mature approach that the U.S. took regarding the incident, which was a simple statement which focused on the most important issue: 'the regret at the loss of life'. It seems clear to the undergraduate law student that several of the above mentioned statements were taken without due advice on the law or on the limits of the state action. This is not a responsible approach to international relations that bodes well for the future of international public order. The worst statement of all, perhaps, came from William Hague. Hague stated that Israel, had 'unacceptably blockaded Gaza'. This is nonsense as Israel has every right to blockade access to Gaza, as Gaza is not a land-locked state covered by international law. This is frightening because the Foreign Office in the UK has one of the most astounding international lawyers around working for them, Daniel Bethlehem QC who would, if no doubt consulted, given Hague advice to the contrary. If a country like UK, well equipped with lawyers at the tax payers expense can't get this right, then there is little hope of decent UK leadership in the Security Council on this and the other issues relating to international security.   Hague is setting a woeful example to the rest of the world. A wise adage of 'the greater the possibility of outrage, more tempered recourse to vocality' needs to be followed.

Copyright Abhijit P.G. Pandya  2010

Copyright Birkenhead Society 2010

Why we should leave the EU- The simple and forgotten truth of its redundancy, and a worrying future ahead.

2010-05-17T15:42:00.001-07:00

The purpose of entering into an international institutional arrangement by a state is rarely gratuitous. As all serious international relations scholars know, they do not exist to ‘preserve peace’- that is phrase is simply a selling term for a portion of the public. Rather, the purpose of an international institution is to further a nation’s foreign economic policy and foreign affairs strategy. A rarely recalled or argued position nowadays is why Britain had an obsession to fight De Gaulle’s veto on its membership of the European Economic Community in the 1960s. The crucial answer is that this was a part of trans-Atlantic policy on cold war containment of communism. That case is no longer existing; an economic union is not required to promote capitalist growth in a world of conflicting ideologies. Furthermore, global trade tariffs between states have decreased significantly since the Second World War, from around an average of 12% to over 2% today. Unfortunately for the UK's past foreign economic strategists the most significant reduction in tariffs occurred in 1973 when the Tokyo round of trade negotiations came to an end. This was just after the UK's accession to the EEC. The EU has now become almost redundant mechanism for advocating free-trade, on the contrary its regional protectionism is working the other way.

In contrast to the ideological containment from communism granted by the EEC in the 1960s and 1970s, the flow of socialism today is coming the other way: from within Europe. The Lisbon Treaty is expressly predicated on social market economics (Article 2(3)), though the implications of this are lost on the current cadre of British Conservative politicians. Priority emphasis on social policy by the US Congress was a key strategy in centralising and increasing the power of the US Federation between 1936 to 1976. More significantly, one of the key factors that made nation states successful were their ability to control the public and private divide, and the distinction between the state and the market. For some international relations scholars this is the key attribute of the nation state, and it is wholly waived away with the consent given to Europe to create a social market and thus decide where this delineation is to be made. Though we consented through referendum to an internal market in 1975, there was never a contract, so to speak, between the British people and its Government to handover such a significant policy making role to an external institution. The power that this provision alone grants to the European Commission on economic matters and the clear mandate it gives to a federal project has been underestimated by the House of Commons in 2009 where there was no motion for referendum. Further, it changes the nature of those who support the EU. Those who were pro-membership of the common-market, must now re-think their position as to whether they want welfare and economic matters to be conducted at the European level. In blunt terms one can no longer be pro-common market without also being a Federalist.

Unfortunately, the current political leadership of the UK was educated in period of British history when there was a dominance of an uncritical approach of the raison d’etre of the nation state in University education that was primarily motivated by the 1960s revolt against a virtuous and rightly puritanical imperial conceptualisation of Britannia. The result today is a generation that, though has shed its historic identity built over centuries, has not found an equivalent ideology from which to defend the nation state. This is why the importance of Lisbon, and then the corollary importance of holding a referendum is lost on them. Without being able to conceptualise the historical importance of creating nation states those currently in Government cannot simply make the simple deduction that Britain after three hundred years of Unionism is not in the same position as California entering into the US Republic in 1850. Alas, the future does not bode any better- Nowhere today in the education of a British child from the age of 3 years to 16 is the history and purpose of the nation state found. Particularly the invaluable lesson of the importance of the British nation state to act as a bulwark against anti-liberal ideologues in recent history is not made, let alone Britain’s contribution to the current global blooming of democracy. Instead paltry school teachers constantly confuse basic terms such as ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’, the latter unfairly dominated in its characterization by post Weimar Germany. The significance of this is not just that Britain, through those who Govern it, will accept Lisbon- but those will Govern it in the future are just as likely to accept a Federal European structure through the same causal problem of ‘denationalisation’ in education being as likely to be endemic in the next decade as in the previous few.

Lisbon of course is an extraordinary treaty. To take a few examples: one could read thousands of international treaties and not come across one that proclaims that states have the right to denounce it. Yet Article 50 of Lisbon does just that, making the most crucial matter of national sovereignty delineable on the international sphere. Article 67(2) of the Treaty ensures that immigration policy in the future is no longer to be conducted at the national level. In no previous European treaty was there a provision that permitted the Commission to make uniform laws for all member states on any matters it sees fit, yet that appears in Article 114 (1) of Lisbon- a basic supremacy clause, unlimited undefined over national legislature. At the time of writing, it is extraordinary that no British journalist has seen the implications of this provision or made an appropriate hue and cry. In the 2010 General Election, no major political party explained this to the electorate. When Cameron hollowly cried change, how little his voters new that this is soon to be coming in an enormous way, but necessarily from the source they might expect.

At present, Cameron is certainly the wrong leader for a critical approach to European polity. His own politics has brought the Conservative Party closest to a French Republic egalitarian model than any time in its previous history. The media point out how much of the centre ground Cameron’s conservatism has taken; how odd that the more painful and important reality is how much closer to the centre ground he would be in the European Parliament, dominated by social democrats, if it was reflective of national polity. On this reading, his embracing of the social market model is such, that one can no longer make the case that Edmund Burke, the truest blue theorist of all time, could really be the progenitor of the current Conservative party. By not making a case for the nation state coupled with a referendum, Cameron also demonstrates that he does not have a subtle grasp of real-politick on the international sphere. He has failed to concretely grasp that international relations is meaningless without a nation, and that a nation amounts to very little without legislative sovereignty. When Foreign Policy is conducted regionally on the European level it may finally come home, to those who were prescient, that the nation state is finally dead. Lisbon has opened the door to this with the crucial and broadly drafted new Article 22(1). The critical point comes not with further erosion of Sovereignty, as awful as that is from the perspective of democratic legitimacy, but where European Governance determines when one can and cannot enter into international obligations- this is the point when independence ends and complete dependence and subjugation begins. Lisbon is making that door already: Where national defence objectives do not meet the common defence interests of member states, Title V Chapter 1 provisions in Lisbon would defer to an international approach. This generic approach is not a good omen for the future positioning of Britain in Europe or in the on-coming new World order where China will be a dominant player. Nor there is an argument of how the European Council will or could come to an agreement over what are ‘common security matters’, the system of Lisbon is only at present predicated on disenfranchising national political discourse on foreign policy from the supra-national level.

With such features in the Lisbon treaty it must be asked in all seriousness to maintain legitimacy of the European project in Britain, that the very least the British people deserve is a neutral source such as a Royal Commission explaining to them what Lisbon involves. Then only can they make an informed and valid choice at the next election.

Copyright Abhijit P.G. Pandya
Copyright Birkenhead Society 2010.

Why the human rights lawyers are the ‘true anti-liberals’.

2010-02-13T22:04:00.000-08:00

The European Convention on Human Rights is a unique hypocrisy amongst
Instruments claiming to protect liberty. For all the supposed liberties it grants (which reflect select values of a few lawyers and civil servants and not the people of Europe that its title grandiosely seems to claim), it allows the state to define circumstances in which to take them away. But it is more than this, in classic ‘anti-liberal’ spirit, the Convention also defines the limits of the right through the exercise of the provisos upon which it can be used.

The nature of rights is to have an unlimited number of claims against the state. That it is the duty of the state to provide for them, irrespective of the merit of the individual bringing forward the claim. One sees in its most primitive political form as the bogus: ‘all men are equal’ doctrine. For the claimants it is conveniently forgotten that the state is really the public personified. The human rights brigade forget that with every claim there is a burden and a cost. The only way these claims are to be met is by increasing the size of the state to meet those demands. This reduces the choice of what those that do not want rights in the machinery of Government. For example, the right to housing is a burden of tax. The right to privacy will encumber some other legitimate claim to information, and so on. This is the inherent ‘anti-liberalism’ of the claim.

In the true John Stuart Mill sense of liberalism, a right cannot legitimately exist if it is a burden to others. Otherwise one is simply claiming the right to swing one’s fist despite punching others on the nose. Secondly, Mills tells us that a right cannot be espoused in the spirit of liberty unless it can manifest through legitimate state action that prevents its exercise interfering with others. The one proviso is ‘harm’. As far as the European Convention is concerned it is for the Government in question to define harm. However, this cannot be a liberal reading of the concept of a right. The liberal reading must be that the right exists 'unrestrictedly unless it is exercised harmfully'. Otherwise state action could define the limits to exercising the right, before the right is exercised. This is exactly what, however, the growing European Human Rights law does.

Now to demonstrate how the claims machine works in practice, look no further than the tragic case of Gita Saghal. Gita was sacked by Amnesty international for criticizing its pro-terrorist approach to rights claims. But of course she was, this sits in with the ‘anti-liberal’ approach: rights must be for all irrespective of duty, conduct and demonstrable vindication of obligation to one’s fellow man. Worryingly of all for the state is the more subtle espousal of immoral greed of human action without responsibility that this conceptualisation of rights espouses. Taken to its extreme it leads not only to anarchy in practice when these claims remain unfulfilled, but anarchy in theory when the state is seen as secondary to any individual interest. Therein lies its potential to destroy the equilibrium of society, through its imbalance of the economy of public policy. To echo the words of Thomas Paine, it is better to have no rights and a state, rather than the other way around, as in the latter there is no rule of law.

Lawyers and Governments that seek vindication of these political choices through the legal system, do so at the cost of politicizing the judiciary and weakening it through allowing it to infringe the separation of powers. This reduces the legitimacy of the judiciary in the eyes of the public, undermining the rule of law.

Another spurious logic fostered by the human rights vigilantes is the overall benefit doctrine. E.g. Signing up to rights can be likened to telling a taxi driver that he is better off being restricted in his trade through licencing, as the safety that licencing brings increases the trade. Unfortunately it does not, as once the cost burden outweighs the incentive to trade, there is, well simply: no trade. In this way one persons unrestricted right can cause harm to others (e.g. my right to cross-roads safely, against the number of drops a cab can make). The problem arises when one argues polar opposites of this example, the subtle balancing act that is needed to preserve liberty, is lost as the proverbial baby with the bath water.

Abhijit PG Pandya
Copyright Birkenhead Society.

Climate Change- The Beginning of decline and fall, and the end of the Enlightenment in British Parliamentary Politics.

2009-12-12T21:54:00.001-08:00

Waugh’s quintessential novel depicts the down-ward spiral of the life of Mr. Pennyfeather who, having left behind common-sense at University, is marred with the frustrations of tutoring at a minor Public School. Though the novel principally flagellated and marred the minor Public School into the English psyche, its plot is a tempting metaphor for the effects of the current debates on climate change upon British politics.

Climate change is fascinating and disturbing for one clear reason: it reflects the fantastical, fanatical and dangerous truth that bottom-up politics still exists. That the media are the true purveyors of the public’s opinions and that their vintage liquor can not only immediately affect political discourse, but also vehemently soak through the agenda of policy. Take a step back from the rows over whether a particular approach or empirical outcome is veracious and deliberate over the overall methodology used to promote the debate. The first overreaching of reason is the following logic, expressed in general terms: That there does not need certain proof of a matter for it to take up Government time, and resource. Secondly, that it is now possible to contend that the greater the supposed harm of an issue, the more the requirement certainty of empirical proof can be over-reached. Taken to its logical conclusion, we enter into a new primitive approach to political agenda setting- namely that the more ‘hue and cry’ and ‘hyperventilation’ over an issue to which there is a supposed general, undefined harm, the greater the priority that issue should take. The fundamental risk this leaves us with is to undermine the very requirement of political agenda setting, and to falsely prioritise one or more issues over others, leaving important matters of Parliamentary consideration at the bottom of the heap. The Victorians tried very hard to iron this ‘shout and leap’ approach out of Parliamentary debates; though, one would concede, with mixed success. Note this following reflective passage in Anthony Trollope's 'The Prime Minister' concerning the debates regarding Irish home rule: 'Had some inscrutable decree of fate ordained and made it certain,- with a certainty not to be disturbed, that- no candidate could be returned to Parliament who would not assert the earth to be triangular, there would rise immediately a clamorous assertion of triangularity amongst political aspirants. The test would be an innocent one- candidates have swallowed and do swallow many a worse one'. A persistent Westminster problem that had to be overcome was that the more emotion an issue caused the more time it would take up in the house. This is where acute reason, one that does not seek harmony or concord on an issue to further expediency over legitimacy, is needed. I for one, (and this maybe an immense failing of mine) cannot recall a debate over legitimacy of this issue with respect to overall policy agenda. If this has occurred, then it is surprising to me that those who see questioning the validity of the issue do not raise this in counter-argument.

That man has an impact on his climate is by no means clear. Further, that man has ‘detrimental’ impact is no means clear, particularly as the word ‘detrimental’ here is primarily anthrocentric- yes life on this planet would not necessarily continue with respect to man, it not being implausible that some obscure aquatic specie might not benefit from supposed man made climatic changes. Then there are general arguments, sociological, not scientific that are ignored- society as it stands would have to change. It is not as if this would not happen anyway, but there is a strangely Delphic presumption that this would be harmful. What is and is not ‘harmful’ is not necessarily important to qualify, mere change to common behaviour and contemporaneous societal customs is enough. One could go one with the various oversimplifications and assumptions that lie in the heart of presuming the issue once the debate moves beyond science. Another key one that has been overlooked is the weakness of scientific methodology itself. That statistics fuelled scientific research is by its nature empirically questionable, that when one demonstrates a trend one has to, importantly, demonstrate the non-existence of a counter-trend. This latter issue is not placed at the heart of the debate, because it has not had to be as the agenda is set and the legitimacy of the issue is assumed. Thus the approach of presumption makes it harder, not easier, to vindicate any truth in the argument in the long-run. One obvious solution might be is to have a separate Parliamentary committee or body where the skeptics can put their own papers forward. Perhaps, only such an approach is fair and democratic.

APG Pandya
Copyright Birkenhead Society.

Revival of old Economic Theory to match these uncertain times is needed:

2009-12-11T21:16:00.001-08:00

Labour has fluncked Britain’s economy, as much as Britain’s economy has flunked itself. The Government of course is only to blame if the huge rise in public spending, is related to the lack of credit in the markets. The link would have been clear to even the most disgruntled, asinine of economists twenty years ago: multiple raising of taxation, to slowly and surely dry the credit swamp. And credit swamp it was. When rebranded old-Labour first came into power in 1997 the economy was in a period of growth and there was a steady increase in working capital in the country to allow for a slow expansion of the market.

The problem today resulted from an acute ideological short-coming in the New Labour propoundment of the mythology of a socialist brand of commerce. In simple terms: that whilst Blair was pretending to show he loved business, his Party had never truly signed up to free-market ideology. It forgot about the premise of low taxation and more importantly that this premise should run through all areas of policy making and Government function. Au contraire, Labour’s post 1997 strategy was in tight fitting with much of its traditional socialist economic position: (i) tax and spend and (ii) oppose the free-market with increased cost associated regulation. The Tories, however, doing well in the polls are missing a trick here. Whilst current Shadow Treasury focus is to emphasise the deficit, and thus lay the ground for an agenda of cuts (which both mainstream parties have now conceded), they are not taking the opportunity to bring back free-market ideologues into the current economic discourse. It should be made clear to the City that Friedman style approaches to fiscal policy that resulted in an overall paradigm of growth in the 80s and 90s, shall once more become the mainstream- and there shall be a gradual claw-back of taxation on all fronts. Basic macro-economics will show a relationship between taxing the end of any line of consumption and the primary producer of credit: thus cutting tax on all fronts for a member of the public or corporations, will assist the lenders and the market as a whole. Excessive critiques of bankers should also be curtailed: the modern economy is credit based, and in large parts credit driven. Bankers are thus one of the cornerstone and first foundation stones of our economy. They turn its first wheel. We could do more than reflect on whether the fault lies with them or, more truly, with New Labour. As long as we have our modern economy and society, we will need them and their revival will be, in both short and medium term, the path to our economic recovery.

APG Pandya
Copyright Birkenhead Society.

Effective Border Controls Could Protect our culture:

2009-11-15T20:59:00.001-08:00

Since Labour came into power in 1997 immigration has reached unprecedented levels, incomparable to any figure in recent centuries. The Times recently reported that Labour had deliberately told immigration officials to overlook borderline migrant cases (Minette Marrin 01/11/09). This insidious approach was also an abrogation of duty; there were several thousand unemployed in Britain that may have lost job opportunities or the resources to create businesses (such as credit). It is hardly surprising that so many of those struggling to get on the social ladder voted for the BNP in the European Elections this year.

However, Immigration Controls are not just there to prevent resources, but also to protect culture. To protect our culture rates of assimilation are relevant. The post Enlightenment rational approach to society, education and politick is not only uniquely Western, but is more uniquely British. Victorian liberal values of toleration, including not censoring speech that others might want to hear because of selfish sensitivities, took time to absorb and become main-stream social norms. The idea of free-discussion for national interest in politics that formed the key to Parliamentary democracy, was of course first developed in Britain as a result of post-reformation progress based on individual reason. British culture, which is intrinsically humanist, is not everyone’s cup of tea. It is a product of a rare formation of a myriad of factors that makes it difficult for any foreigner to digest. Few that arrive will pick up copies of Macaulay, Dryden or any abridged account of our culture. Often it is not just the comparative poor literacy amongst migrants that is the issue, but rather their cultural traditions, based often in superstition, that are incompatible with the intellectual rigor that British cultural integration requires. The indigenous common man does not have such a problem, as great British thinking is his through being filtered down socially. There is also the issue of will and motivation amongst some, though not all, newcomers. Once migrants are here, they often do not wish to jump several hundred years of history and assimilate. Thus immigration controls need to be in the hundreds, with rigorous testing designed to determine cultural assimilation, rather than the thousands or tens of thousand that politicians arbitrarily claim.

For those that are already here accepting freedom and individual responsibility in a liberal society is a tough choice, and scary. People need to come out of their foreign cultural shells and embrace British plurality. Language and lack of local knowledge are huge barriers. Assimilation can only effectively work through direct personal contact, when others have time to give to foreigners. Huge numbers of migrants will not make this possible. Huge numbers will alienate most people from indigenous folk who aware of important nuances of local history and society. Political correctness, and multi-culturalism do not help assimilation either. Developing states all aspire to market-liberalism and freedom of society, yet multi-culturalism denies all the important cultural aspects that go into allowing this, to migrants in the UK. It fetters assimilation, which has already been made so difficult by the huge swathes of foreign folk that now swamp the concrete social housing ghettoes of inner cities. Worst of all multi-culturalism was disguised as a moral approach, whereas in reality it was an abnegation of social and Governmental responsibility to assimilate migrants. When huge numbers of those with foreign culture (not race as the BNP have tried to flag the issue upon) are given votes, they can work to operate against the British cultural value of toleration. Without assimilation their primary affinity may also be with their state of provenance. This means that they may be willing to vote for measures or people who have interests other than Britain’s at heart. This may be particularly acute in the field of foreign policy as the 2005 electoral success of George Galloway showed.

Lack of willingness to compel assimilation is also a result of a maligned understanding of the global contribution of British culture. The Nehru’s and Gandhi’s of this world were created through the post-enlightenment British education method. Political activists for rights, such as Mandela, had found their values from their education in both Anglican Christianity and post-Enlightenment English Common Law. The victory over the closed autocracy of communism of the Soviets, was predominantly based on two key enlightenment philosophers: John Locke (who conceived the importance of protecting private property rights, which had a significant impact on ideologies that formed the market state) and Adam Smith (whose work placed effective resource usage into the process of Government). Many immigrants from Less Developed Countries, have little appreciation of the importance of upholding contracts and how a rule of law state operates. The difficulties of bringing the idea of individual responsibility and institutional accountability to the developing world, is something that those who work in the field of law and development are all too familiar with. All these problems are too quickly overlooked in Parliament. Time is pressing. The time is now here to put our culture back at the heart of our nation, and to ensure that immigration numbers are curbed significantly to protect it. Or else we are at risk of not losing who we are, but the essence of all we are.

APG Pandya
Copyright Birkenhead Society.

Soft-boiled Egg? Time and Cameron will prove otherwise.

2009-10-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

It is interesting to note Charles Moore’s piece in this Saturday’s Telegraph (03/10/09) where he discusses David Cameron’s ‘pointlessness’. However much a soft-boiled egg Cameron may seem to some at the moment, there is no doubt that the fortitude of Cameron will show over the next decade. His biographers Francis Elliott and James Hanning noted a school contemporary of Cameron’s describing him ‘as the hardest of all’ in the class. This was not a reflection of outward demeanour or crass physical power, but an intimation of a rather more subtle strength. This is force of will and determination, coupled with self-belief. These are qualities so evidently lacking in our current Prime Minister, which the electorate can sense under Brown’s skin.

Whilst Brown let Blair and Mandelson trample all over him in the 1994 Labour Leadership bid, Cameron’s boldness took him to the top of his Party at the age of just 39 years. Politicians can be crudely divided into soft-boiled and hard-boiled eggs. Heath was inextricably the soft-boiled egg; self-involved, self-pitying and sybaritic. Another Conservative Politician of similar age, and perhaps greater standing, Enoch Powell was off the hard-boiled type. Powell’s resilience to Europe, brought visible the soft-egg characteristics of Heath. Whilst Powell espoused the laissez-faire economics of the future during the economic turbulence of the 1970s, Heath, for all his skills, locked himself in Downing Street drowning out the discontents with heavy chords from his piano. In the end the piano was far harder to remove from number 10, than the former Prime Minister himself.

Thatcher was different. She was a hard-boiled egg that got so hard that it turned from dairy product to product of metallurgy. She became the ultimate hard-boiled egg. She was more Churchillian than Churchill because she was less self-involved. There is no doubt that the lack of this characteristic makes one more of the hard-boiled specimen. The nature of politics dictates this. If one looks closely at Cameron and Brown, sybarticism is extra-ordinarily deficient in Cameron. In Brown it is on its face. Perhaps, this is what is giving Cameron the edge at present. Of course only time will tell what type of egg David Cameron really is, however Charles Moore is being rather quick to judge. He would not have done so with the dessert wine of Lord Pearson that he was imbuing during his discussion of ‘pointlessness’. Neither should he do so for David Cameron.

The advantages of being a so called member of the ‘political class’, as Moore puts Cameron, disproportionately outweigh the negatives. Some voters are even intuitively drawn towards political elites. It is this very gravity that some members of UKIP seek for from the election of Lord Pearson. Pearson carries weight because he is balanced and not drawn to unnecessary introspection. This much I have learnt from the short-period I have known him.

In the end ‘pointlessness’ will be seen for the incongruent adjective it is, when in front of the name of the Tory leader. This is not necessarily when the election is won, but at present when the majority of the country now seemingly are behind Cameron. Further, no politician, in a representative democracy, is truly pointless. At the very least they reflect an important choice of some voter.

Copyright APG Pandya
Copyright The Birkenhead Society

Al Megrahi-The Fallacy of Devolution

2009-09-02T04:12:00.001-07:00

The Prime Minister has been rightfully shot at for the farce surrounding the deportation of Al-Megrahi, but little focus has been made thus far on the systemic failure that caused it. Devolution is the key reason that a convicted terrorist is now on the loose. To devolve national security matters to a regional electoral body with limited decision-making capacity is a error waiting to turn into catastrophe. Decisions such as this do not just affect everyone in the British Isles, the nature of threat of Islamic extremism is such that they affect everyone in the civilised world. This is why they require a full debate and discussion at Westminster so that our own territorial security is preserved.

Devolution was always a bad idea, there was nothing wrong with national representation as far as consensus in political decision-making was concerned. It was brought in by wishful Labour sentiment, that wanted to see further fragmentation of the British Isles and erosion of our extra-ordinary common history since the Act of Union in 1707. It was only a matter of time before blind regionalism of the SNP was seen for the fallacy that it is, and Alex Salmond’s ridiculously flawed political judgment surfaced. Once you fragment law and policy making power, territorial integrity weakens. The formation, for example, of England from the 9th to 11th Centuries from weak fiefdoms was done on the fundamental and important premise of territorial security; I.E. to protect us from invaders.

Complete individual representation in political process is always done at a trade-off for the security of larger consensus. It is inherent in this correct approach that regional and local needs are inevitably diluted. Because security is the primary reason for the state (I wont bother citing Hobbes here), it justifies a compulsory enervation into the ideal of absolute and perfect representation. Devolution, leading to the opposite concept, is thus inherently flawed. Thus supporters of extremism are not laughing just at the weakness shown to violent intimidation of this decision has demonstrated by us, but also the weakening of our Union. Once the foundations of the latter are weakened to a sufficient degree, the terrorists have won a far greater threat than just blowing up an airline.

APG Pandya
Copyright Birkenhead Society.

Churchill -a voice from the past.

2009-08-04T00:53:00.000-07:00

I was called in my dreams,
by a nation asleep.
Whose times had gone hard, troubled
and bad.
Whose liberties and reasons, had
been stifled by quarrel and vice,
whose lands were at risk from
the storms of the night.

In my youth my vigour,
led to courage and endeavour.
To fights unexpected, I drew my breath
both in the house and abroad,
Later my soldiers and navy were glorious and
unbowed.

I defeated a dictator, liberated the world,
fought for Empire and your freedom.
My passion, my fervour gave rouse,
to feelings of greatness, in a nation cast down.
I did this for freedom inherent in our way of life,
for the victory of reason
over self-interest, complacency and apathy
to fight.

Do as I do, stay awake and fight; don't stand for the erosion
of freedom; and liberty
will be yours, a treasured right.

APG Pandya Copyright 2009
The Birkenhead Society Copyright 2009
No reproduction in part or whole without permission

Is a multi-dimensional approach to knife-crime needed?

2009-07-06T19:58:00.000-07:00

Serious benefits can be gained from a broad approach to knife-crime, that deals not only with deterring putative offenders, but also one that changes the culture of conduct amongst young-people. Knife crime is a serious issue harming a significant portion of society. Hackney in London, for example, has more than one knife crime incident per day. There is much that can be done for those who are likely to be knife-crime offenders. Many of them do not even know that it is illegal to carry a knife, hence the Government’s change of law will have limited deterrence impact in the short-term. To change this a simple remedy of out-reaching this information into schools, youth organisations, young-offenders and school absconder units with a message of illegality can go someway. The other method, through videos and small-talks, is education in these units of the harmful effects of knife-crime on families to young-people. This would, hopefully, bring about a culture change of young-people, including instances where they might ostracise others who are willing to carry knives.
One of the key reasons why young people are susceptible to carrying knives is due to fear of being bullied and intimidated. Thus removing the fear, and the bullying and aggressive behaviour towards one another is key in solving this problem. The message of harm and illegality, as described above, needs to be put in with a message that demonstrates that bullying is cowardice, and that it is only carried out by those who are fearful. This may cause some young people to ostracise bullies and minimise gang groupings that are likely to offend. Further, by reducing the fear of being picked on it will disincentivise those who feel like picking up a knife to defend themselves.

For those who are ostracised from out-reaching programmes to deal with knife crime, specialist group out-reaching may be needed. This may link into other crime prevention programmes in youth criminal justice policy. For example, New Labour t introduced the social assistance category called NEETS (Not in Education, Employment or Training). Part of the reason for doing this is to analyse in-group those that are disaffected so as to minimise long term reliance on social benefits, and to assist them in returning to the mainstream of society (See the Labour Government’s flawed 2001 White Paper on Transforming Youth Work). Identifying young people who are socially disaffected, such as some of the NEETS, is the first step in preventing them falling into the criminal justice system. By then doing the secondary analysis of factors that are likely to create NEETS categorisation, or those socially disaffected, and eliminating the causes of those NEETS and absconders who are likely to turn into offenders can be minimised. Even if this is possible, it will not enervate wholly the numbers of youth offenders, but it may however reduce numbers. Some of the factors that go into NEETS categorisation will range from the following, either cumulatively or individually. They demonstrate some of the difficult, though manageable causes of youth disaffection and offending:

(i) Single parent family background without adequate support.
(ii) Unemployment history amongst parents.
(iii) Lack of higher education amongst parent(s)
(iv) Being brought up in social housing
(v)Lack of family or schooling based awareness on the importance of education to employability
(vi) Being brought up in particular areas where opportunities are less with a lack of incentive to travel for and search for labour.
(vii) Lack of appreciation of benefits of employment to social choice and lifestyle. Several disaffected youths have never seen an employed environment or ever noted the capital benefits of labour.
(viii) School truancy.
(ix) Lack of assistance in destitute or violent homes and family background.

As a general proposition, it reduces cost to national revenue in the long-run to remove those going through the criminal justice system and place them on the labour-market. This further increases their chances of benefiting society (assuming that necessarily skills can be transferred). Thus it is worth investigating the above factors as part of a number of chronic causes of crime and treating them one by one, as far as possible. Many of the above criteria are related to two key issues: (i) understanding the benefits of socially acceptable behaviour and; (ii) understanding the benefits of education. Due to lack of external factors, such as schools and families, educating and training these ‘benefits’ to the disaffected there is little culture change in conduct or approach to life. Thus the reason not use a knife on a victim is never fully appreciated.

Copyright APG Pandya
The Birkenhead Society

Mock the BNP? – No it’s time to really look close at the issues.

2009-06-21T21:16:00.000-07:00

It’s a shame that Nick Griffin got pelted with eggs after his Party won two seats in the European Elections. In a civilised society even the most impalatable of subject matter needs to be discussed and reasoned out. Despite much ill-logic in Griffin’s views, what needs to be determined is why people voted for him. Are they just racist? Or is there something important in the discontent that went to his favour in the European Elections? The answer may be a hybrid of the two, but the latter can be weeded out by the main political parties, particularly by the up and coming Conservatives. The Conservatives can show, as they have done in the past, that patriotism does not have to harbour prejudice. Further that true patriotism could not involve the ostracisation of any British person, and would seek to harmonise all our differences of race or religion for the service of the national interest.

With New Labour’s drive for multi-culturalism and irreverent equating of cultures, in the last twelve years we British have lost sight of who we were. Flag waving was done by a frightened few, and to speak of the greatness of the British Empire was to revive the ghosts of an abhorrent past. Why? This was despite the fact so many races and nationalities fought for the Empire in two world wars. Coupled with Islamic extremism in the UK, and the recent corruption scandal the more visceral voter would have felt his or her anger drawing him to cross the BNP box. But all these things can be remedied by a cultural resurgence drawn on by the Conservative and Unionist Party. The Conservative Party can not only make flag-waving occur with pride, but also with an inimitable British disdain, richly deserved, that we are better than anyone else in the world. Only the briefest look at history is needed to support this.

However, this will not wholly subjugate the BNP vote. Only a formidable curtailment of immigration itself can do that. To realise the depth of this issue and concerns regarding it, and to air those impalatable views is a challenge yet to be met by any leader of a major political party. The BNP voters fears, based on cultural unedification, are also based on loss of job opportunity and weakening of social benefit and public service resources. This is because the BNP despite all its pretensions to the right, and such opportunistic portrayal by Labour politicians, is a left-wing organisation. Let me say that again: the BNP are left wing- they are socialists like the NAZIs. They believe in the abolition of the Monarchy and despite their tactical portrayal of soldiers being harassed by some moslems at home- do not believe it is appropriate for British soldiers to be in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such sentiments, in my view, betray the history of these Isles and the extraordinary ability of its armed-forces. In terms of geo-political strategy they also miss the real-politik, but the BNP does not campaign on or realise the subtleties of what an effective foreign policy involves.

But let me return to immigration. It was practice for people in this country, to come down to London and the South to work from the North. This is now affected by the extension of our borders through the EU. In London the quickest jobs now go to EU immigrants, and non-discrimination laws prevent preference for domestic workers. I for one, would advocate preference. It would bring the challenge of motivating our own people and providing them with opportunities back into the political arena, where it belongs. It would minimise foreign dependency on workers and thus give us a bargaining foreign policy advantage. It would also preserve our own culture, and the culture of the so-called British working man (the disaffected Labour voter likely to vote BNP). It would cut costs for the state by not having to institutionalise assimilation processes for mere work-force availability. It would also increase movement and capital throughout the United Kingdom, and regionalise and not centralise industry and service. All these things are linked, and the concatenations are not always appreciated by policy makers.

There is no reason for people to vote BNP on these lines, if major parties can whip up protectionist policies with respect to the labour market. Nick Griffin is forever playing the sympathy card- note what he says after the egg pelting on Parliament- ‘the police were ordered to do nothing’. It’s as if there’s a conspiracy against his party, against the putative truths that it represents. His arguments are filled with lack of logic and sentiment. When asked why his was an all white party, he simply refers to the existence of the Black Police Federation with simultaneous banning of BNP police officers. Is the existence of the two measures not somehow linked? Further his cited police scenario is one of political and not racial discrimination. However, the number of votes he gained at the European Elections should not be ignored. At the very least a brief analysis should be attempted as to why this is so.

Harsher measures should not be shied away from, therein lies the true art of statecraft. Here’s one suggestion, and the question that follows it is why is this so controversial? Should it be?: Immigration without imposition of British culture should not be allowed. Otherwise we fear losing toleration, a cornerstone of British political culture. Toleration is alien to many alien cultures and this should not be forgotten. It is incompatible, for example, with the singularity of radical Islam.

APG Pandya
Copyright Birkenhead Society.

Expenses Scandal- The Politicians merely represent a morally bankrupt society.

2009-05-22T21:07:00.000-07:00

Don’t wholly blame the politicians for the expenses scandal. A scandal that has destroyed the legitimacy of Parliament. The scandal that has fuelled the ever-growing political apathy amongst the people. The behaviour of these MPs merely reflects a morally bankrupt society. A society, which has perverted toleration to a degree that sources of value such as church, and family have been gradually eroded to make way for libertarianism and its related character flaw, extravagance. A society that has allowed religions that value an education based on racial discrimination and the imprisonment of women to be funded by the state. A society that has no moral voice, no clear moral philosophy of what is right and wrong and hence whose politicians have no clear yardsticks for accountability.
The joys of wealth and materialism is what we are all told to aim for, and few of us, including many of the journalists putatively outraged, have the moral integrity to challenge the values of our society. Self-fulfilment at the cost of ethics is the new code of aspiration for Britain. Educational certificates from GCSE’s to Degrees are watered down to be turned into simple permits, to be obtained for the sake of gaining access to the economy rather than to serve intellectual fulfillment. Hence many young people will merely enter the world with a weakened and dubious sense of scrutiny and an enervated ability to question. Community concerns are now useful in forming pithy sayings to create image, yet we live in a world where politicians work in Westminster only miles from abhorrent teenage drunkenness in Soho. No one is willing or able to yell at these people wasting their lives on cans of larger. In today's Britain the next door neighbor is too afraid to take the parents of the misbehaving youth to account. There is too much fear of censure, or at worse legal action. In this way community responsibility for each other is eroded and carelessness about our people and country ensues. Apathy is quick to follow, first of local society, and then of the nation. Politics, too self-absorbed in contenting itself rather than realising its responsibility, allows this illness to increase weakening a once proud nation. It is that apathy that distances the electorate from those who govern, and weakens electoral accountability of Governmental action. For this, echoing the words of Cassius: 'the fault is in ourselves'. That is of the people and not of their servants in Parliament.
In an age of sound-bites, where form over substance erodes accountability in politics it is not surprising that so many MPs thought they could get away with it for so long. People at large were too apathetic, too self-contented to question those in charge, the manner in which they Governed. Foolishly, after two centuries of difficult campaigning for the voting franchise, the British electorate left Governing to the Government. The popular substance-less politics has finally had its day of judgment. Though, let us not forget they were voted for. It is the peoples role to be dynamic to provide an alternative, whether by individuals coming forward as candidates or to form new parties in the absence of alternatives. That would be a sign of a people who are aware that the true responsibility of Government lies with them. The indictment of the people is clear. The politicians in the modern age only reflect the values of those who choose them. It is hard to imagine a 19th Century moral reformer such as William Wilberforce MP having a place in the Parliament of today. Both spin and sound-bite, the hall-marks of modern politics, have no time for difficult moral argument and ethical discourse. Wilberforce would not make entertaining news coverage or assist the sale of newspapers.
The MPs reflect so many of society, and the Labour Government. The Government and so many spent beyond their means in extravagance, taking a joy-ride on the economic good-times without any regard as to importance of national responsibility and impact. It’s as if the MPs were so spoilt in their upbringing that they had never learnt to say ‘no’. We now need to turn and take a deep look at ourselves, and our Parliament, and ask ourselves what we, as people, really stand for. Therein lies the first step to any hope of accountability.

APG Pandya
Chairman
Birkenhead Society.
(Copyright Birkenhead Society 2009)

The Economy: Is New Labour now beyond redemption?

2009-04-23T17:22:00.001-07:00

There have been some great trials in the history of mankind. Nuremberg was one, set-up to determine the guilt of various Nazis. Another has been going on for the last 12 years. This was whether the Labour Party is capable of running an economy and not destroying it. In essence, whether the Labour Party could ever credibly be a party of Government. Initially it managed to hoodwink the public, remarkably, for three successive general elections. However, as the final curtain calls, in this great trial it has inextricably failed. Miserably. It spent with no caution. Its expenditure had no control or accountability. Whilst millions were pumped into public services, there was no account of whether expenditure was used efficiently or viable over the long run. Whilst continuing to spend for public services, it lost billions of pounds to the service industry in order to forge ineffectual public-private partnerships. It pretended to have it all under control by creating fake fiscal institutions like the FSA with no teeth. It made the Bank of England independent, but did not assess its lending through the Treasury.

More shockingly, now, as the country continues to spiral into debt, its extravagant spending reaches new unlimited bounds. With an IMF bailout looming, the Labour party has a secret plan to buy votes irrespective of damage caused to the nation. Highlights include £500M set aside towards environmental policies, part of which will be used to create wind-farms. Millions of pounds will be spent on giving motorists money to buy new cars. Vat will rise, causing a fluctuating tariff that will lend towards consumer uncertainty.
Despite thousands of people losing their jobs, these are the Labour Government’s priorities. Are these the signs of Government that is not only completely incompetent, but in fact going mad? The worst part of this is the immoral introduction of a 50% tax bracket, to continuously feed the extravagance. A failing public-sector, which is relied upon by many that cannot, for whatever reason, endeavour to take self-responsibility for their own health or the schooling of their children, is to be assisted in its destruction by financial assistance. Those most needing public sector support will inevitably, due to inefficiencies encouraged by extravagant funding, get the worst services. The Labour Government has failed to realise that funding without accountability leads to waste. The public debt now is the worst in British history since the establishment of the Bank of England over three hundred years ago. The economy will take decades to repair, and a balanced budget or surplus are not unlikely to come about within the next decade. Billions spent to create and expanded public sector will go to waste as the income will no longer be present to support the projects the Government created. Like the ones at Nuremberg, the current indictment, is one that will not be forgotten. The Labour Government has proved, without doubt, that it cannot run a modern economy. It will be dangerously negligent, destructive, and doing the UK enormous disservice for anyone to vote Labour in next years General Election.

APG Pandya
Copyright
Birkenhead Society

Obama, EU, the Rift and where we stand now:

2009-04-04T19:57:00.000-07:00

Obama’s call to Europe to send more troops to Afghanistan was ignored last week. It’s odd how the Germans and the French leaders do not seem to quite grasp, that there is a war for civilization currently being fought out in that part of the world. The Taliban, notorious for their medieval repression including throwing acid on the faces of women and burning down women’s schools, are fighting against any form of modern liberal Government. Pressure is such that the current incumbent, Hamid Karzai, is forced to follow some policies only found in the most radical Islamic doctrine in order to pacify factions in his populace. The German and French leaders don’t quite value the importance of fundamental freedoms and open Government as much as some of their populations do, and certainly not as much as the US and the UK.

There is an evident fundamental difference in approach here (as there was with the invasion in Iraq in 2003) that should demonstrate to those who fantasise about a Federal European project, with an over-arching super-national foreign policy, that this is another reason why that project is doomed. This problem of cohesion is as great as another, often raised, problem. That is the complete lack of democratic accountability for European Institutions. Lord Hoffmann recently criticised the European Court of Human Rights, for usurping powers that were never given to it. The European Court of Justice, in conjunction with the European Commission and European Council (and previous European Institutions), has been doing that since the late 1950s. It is only self-interested lawyers in the UK, in positions of influence, and of a generation that can recall the Second World War that have continued to sponsor the democratically illegitimate European Project. In their weak understanding of international relations they seem to believe that continued power to the European Union is needed in case another Hitler comes to power in Germany. This approach has reached a certain level of irony that is difficult to muster: the authoritarian law-making by the European Commission and Council is such that one might pinch one’s self to argue that the Nazi’s had a greater mandate to Govern vis-à-vis their own people. No British National has a vote on a European Regulation, nor the conception of policy by the European Commission. Even European Directives only become consented to by forgone Parliamentary Constitutional anomalies that were designed to give assent to Treaties of Peace in forgone centuries. No British National was given a vote on which states should join the continuously expanding project. Like the German people in the late 1930s who found themselves in one moment allied to the French, then to the Russians, we have no say in which peoples will have an allowance from our own taxpayers money, when the European Commission decides to give more subsidies to its newest members. This European project seems to be, a farce by our modern understanding of representative Government. Why do we suffer it?

Further, there is no financial accountability in European Institutions. An official report showed that the European Court of Auditors has not been doing its job. Nor is there any control or accountability of expenditure within European Institutions. Auditing reports demonstrate instances in Brussels were institutional expenditure was rife with corruption and excessive claims. Further to mock the intelligence of the British People a false, almost, powerless institution is created where one can vote for its members. It is mockingly called European ‘Parliament’. The role of the European Parliament is so opaque, that if one was to do a door to door canvass of streets in the UK, anyone who had heard of it would have no ideas what its role or powers are. These were problems with the European project in its very inception. The unelected technocrats, such as Schuman and Monnet, were so concerned with function and purpose of the system that they overlooked mandate. The search for a European Economy or market was so great, that the words ‘Economy’, ‘union’ and ‘market’ simply ran riot and embezzled every other right of a sovereign state to meet their ends. The citizens of nation states did not realize that every law making power that they had delegated to their Government’s could be usurped and re-defined so that it could fit with notions such as ‘market’ and ‘Union’. In this way slowly and surely the entire legislative autonomy of a nation state, and thus its people, has been slowly and continuously filtered off to Brussels.

This current foreign policy difference highlights the reality that the EU’s desire for unlimited ‘centralised’ power cannot belie the individual character of States of the European Union. Both France and Germany are states with huge social characteristics in their domestic policies. It is not all together remarkable that these Fabian instincts of pacifism and wilting to foreign bullies are embedded in their foreign policy instincts. The socialist instinct of selfishness is inherent within this; we are content and complacent in our own nest the rest of the world can go to hell. This is why neither the French nor German Empires created enduring institutions like the British. It also shows that further integration would be a nightmare for Britain. Our culture and instinct are vastly distinct to other Europeans, even those states that are supposed to be most like us. We must reverse the trend of integration, to a national conscious position in Europe where we, the people, can have a right to scrutinize the Commissions Policy Making. There should even be considered a Centre for European Policy installed in the UK with public access to policies and access to clear accounts of expenditure. Any further integration into the European project ought to be stopped, including jettisoning the Lisbon Treaty and its enervation of the nation state. I dare not imagine the day when a Sarkozy has a veto on whether we should invade the Falklands.

APG Pandya

Weekly Public Parliamentary Expenditure Assessments Needed?

2009-04-01T18:13:00.000-07:00

On a train back from the picturesque green fields of the Midlands, pleasantly smiling at the beauty of these Isles from the speeding window, I suddenly found myself sighing sadly. I turned and faced the newspaper and read the news on Jacqui Smith’s husband. Whether this was private impropriety is an issue that I did not want to ponder. However, when I read that tax-payer’s money had been spent for her own family’s pleasure, albeit erotica, I wondered whether there was any moral basis left in this Government. How can a senior cabinet Minister hold such a post, yet not keep control of her Parliamentary allowance? Surely, negligence in one, must relate to incompetence in the other? I forgot that the Labour Party plays on the fallibility of human-beings, in the perverse socialist world where there is a search for meaningless equality. These character traits appeal, somehow they are reflective of all of us and thus acceptable. The Prime Minister condones her conduct by not sacking her on this basis. Voters do, fortunately have a choice between the decency and integrity offered by David Cameron’s Conservatives and the continued corruption of New Labour. Such was the cocksureness of New Labour, that it is attempting to pass a motion to permit MP’s to edit their expenses prior to their release to the public. Have you every heard of such a travesty of transparency, and to the notion of 'open and accountable' Government, that is supposed to be at the heart of every democracy?

Here’s another thought that hit me on the train. One cannot ignore that there is a subtle similarity between the complacent and negligent conduct of the Home Secretary, Lord Milners and the FSA. This is a Government that appoints persons that lack that fundamental important value in a politician, the ability to be 'self-critical' in one’s acts, pertaining to the characteristic of 'self-accountability'. That prevents or reduces one’s personal flaws from entering into politics. If one is not accountable to one-self, then one is hardly going to know the margins of accountability (to the electorate) as a politician. The institution of Financial Services that the Labour Government created, mirrored its personalities. The FSA failed to act to extravagant lending, for two key factors attributable to the Government. Firstly, it had no clear powers to do so (in the same-way Brown is limiting accountability for expenditure) and it was not guided to do so by its Directors. The latter was through not enlarging upon the limited discretion given to it, characteristic of the appointing Government's wish to avoid scrutiny. The word ‘accountability’ is not in the New Labour vocabulary book. Only such a Party could revive Lord Mandelson continuously, choosing political exigency over a shameful past record. With a few months of New Labour coming into power, the door of unaccountability was left wide open and the warning signs given by the secretive and disingenuous conduct of Geoffrey Robinson. The same attitude towards ‘accountability’ is why New Labour tried to make so light of the extremely serious Cash for Peerages scandal. It is a Party machine that thinks it is above these fundamentals of democratic Government: openness and accountability. Fortunately, the British electorate knows better. It values accountability, integrity and honesty as having a place in the heart of politics. This is why next year many people will be finally be glad to be casting their vote away from the Party in red.

As far as the ‘unaccounted’ expenditure is concerned there is now a mistrust held by many members of the public towards the elected. It is now important to militate against this mistrust, by edifying the public faith in Government. What is, perhaps, needed is a short weekly, monthly or annual session in the House of Commons where a general summary, or audit, of personal expenses are read-out. This would be true transparent Government. It would also be a better solution than trying to curb expenditure, or to limit it altogether. To do so would make the life of an MP wholly impracticable.

APG Pandya
[Copyright Birkenhead Society]
http://www.birkenheadsoc.org

Why no one should vote Labour in the next General Election.

2009-03-28T16:45:00.000-07:00

There are somethings so fundamental to our way of life, and the functioning of our society that without them, it will cease to function. The freedom of speech, or communication, is one of those things. If and when a state proscribes what to say and what not to say; it prescribes thought. We cannot function as a society if our thoughts, on what we feel is right and wrong, cannot be expressed in words so that they can be disagreed with or influence others. If so, we will not know what the truth is, what is useful and what is harmful to us. This is all, seemingly, self-evident. However, when Jacqui Smith, the Labour Home Secretary, prevented Geert Wilders for coming to the UK she was doing more than stopping another human-being entering a country. She was proscribing his ideas, and precluding his thought and views AND, more importantly, preventing us from thinking the same. How dare we hear and thus possibly think those things? It is strange today that politicians have usurped such power. Through fear and complacency of our electorate, us, politicians have enacted laws (whether to deal with terrorism or public order), that allow them to proscribe what is right and wrong- through precluding thought and speech. Why, so unreservedly, have we given away this important right, won historically with such difficulty, so cheaply?

This is, partly, because we don't recall or know what type of a state controls ideas. Ask anyone who lived in Stalin's Russia, Mao's China or any American, who was left-leaning (irrespective of degree) during Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunts. The autocratic government sees the controlling of ideas as the first-step in maintaining absolute power. This month a small theatre in London is showing a piece starring Corin Redgrave as Dalton Trumbo. It depicts the actions of the 1947 'HUAC' or House of Un-American Activities Committee (not to be confused with McCarthy's attempts to imprison communists). This committee sought to destroy the careers of those who were thought to be Communists. But these were not Communists who were trying to take-over the US. Frighteningly, they were writers. Those whose views were impalatable and of concern to those in power were put on a blacklist. Those in power felt that the opinions of the blacklisted were a security risk and thus had to be made unlawful. (Like the Nazis, and other autocratic regimes those that founded HUAC failed to see that there is a illogicality in this approach and something important missing. This is whether those proscribed opinions though a threat to existing power (including existing structures or institutions of a state) could still 'legitimately' change power. (It is in precluding the idea, that the nature of these measures is autocratic. As it is the autocratic Government that precludes and usurps the exercise of choice of political ideology through the exercise of its authority).

I can thing of nothing more frightening to a liberal mature democracy who values the expression and reception of ideas as one of the key ways of human evolution than 'HUAC'. 'HUAC' created a blacklist of those opinions that were considered 'dangerous'. These approaches do not have the necessary mandate, or when they do, the mandate is sought through scaremongering of the people or qualified through their fears. One doesn't need to ponder whether the current Government has a 'blacklist'. In the Anti-Crime and Terrorism Act of 2001 the Government has given itself (due to the climate of terrorism) the power to proscribe organisations due to their ideology. Note, that according to this act a nursing organisation going on strike, thereby risking the lives of their patients, can be proscribed. It is frightening to see quite how powerful a piece of legislation this is. Here the Government has given itself the power not only to create a blacklist, but also to enlarge it as it sees fit. Who knows when this Act will be repealed, if ever. The public by and large has said nothing. It seems to think that to save lives it is ok to turn 'a little autocratic', as one girl told me. 'Why then did we fight the Nazis and not just join them?' I replied. This kind of usurpation of power must need a democratic mandate. I am not sure I want to live in a state that fights for terror most effectively, when it is being autocratic. To the current Home Secretary public peace is more important than the cost of policing-riots or a public march that arises from airing a view-point. That is not democracy, but dictatorship arising out of fear of losing control. If that is the case than the Labour Government is taking us backwards in time through the development of democracy and the modern world. No one should forget that recently in the early 17th C Galileo was bullied in front of a powerful inquisition for daring to say that the Earth moved around the Sun. The US Government failed to see the glaringly obvious, that by trying to proscribe the Communists it was emulating Stalin. People say 'but people get offended by some views, so those views should not be aired'. Is it not the responsibility in a mature democracy of those whose powers of reason are above the passions of taking offence to teach the others to 'offer the other cheek'? Or should we worry as Jacqui Smith and the 17thC Papacy did about public unrest and loss of authority due to the launching of an opinion? That response is a mark of Governmental failure; where a Government has to proscribe views it has lost control. This continuous enervation of our democratic society, feasibly deserves a national no vote against Labour in the next General Election. Another irrelevant thought comes to me here. This conduct by the State fosters lack of toleration amongst our people; it tells us not to tolerate the views of others, the state may even step into defend us from being offended. So many youth violent crimes occur due to 'he/she was disrespecting me'. It is surprising from this view why the Government is giving into possible violent reaction to Wilders.

The freedom to impart and receive ideas was placed specifically in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention of Human Rights. This followed a harsh reflection on the dangers of book-burning and its relationship with totalitarian regimes such as that of the Nazis. Now within these sentiments is a reason why Geert Wilders maybe wrong to call for the banning of the Koran. More pressingly, however, there is a similarity, a frightening, one that is over-looked. This is between his views towards the Koran and the Home Secretary's decision to ban him. Both I submit are wholly misconceived and wrong.

APG Pandya
Copyright Birkenhead Society.

2009-03-03T16:22:00.000-08:00

What Wilders would have said if the dhimmi British officials had allowed him in:

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much.
Thank you for inviting me. Thank you Lord Pearson and Lady Cox for showing Fitna, and for your gracious invitation. While others look away, you, seem to understand the true tradition of your country, and a flag that still stands for freedom.
This is no ordinary place. This is not just one of England’s tourist attractions. This is a sacred place. This is the mother of all Parliaments, and I am deeply humbled to speak before you.
The Houses of Parliament is where Winston Churchill stood firm, and warned – all throughout the 1930’s – for the dangers looming. Most of the time he stood alone.
In 1982 President Reagan came to the House of Commons, where he did a speech very few people liked. Reagan called upon the West to reject communism and defend freedom. He introduced a phrase: ‘evil empire’. Reagan’s speech stands out as a clarion call to preserve our liberties. I quote: If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.
What Reagan meant is that you cannot run away from history, you cannot escape the dangers of ideologies that are out to destroy you. Denial is no option.
Communism was indeed left on the ash heap of history, just as Reagan predicted in his speech in the House of Commons. He lived to see the Berlin Wall coming down, just as Churchill witnessed the implosion of national-socialism.
Today, I come before you to warn of another great threat. It is called Islam. It poses as a religion, but its goals are very worldly: world domination, holy war, sharia law, the end of the separation of church and state, the end of democracy. It is not a religion, it is a political ideology. It demands you respect, but has no respect for you.
There might be moderate Muslims, but there is no moderate Islam. Islam will never change, because it is build on two rocks that are forever, two fundamental beliefs that will never change, and will never go away. First, there is Quran, Allah’s personal word, uncreated, forever, with orders that need to be fulfilled regardless of place or time. And second, there is al-insal al-kamil, the perfect man, Muhammad the role model, whose deeds are to be imitated by all Muslims. And since Muhammad was a warlord and a conqueror we know what to expect.Islam means submission, so there cannot be any mistake about it’s goal. That’s a given. The question is whether the British people, with its glorious past, is longing for that submission.
We see Islam taking off in the West at an incredible speed. The United Kingdom has seen a rapid growth of the number of Muslims. Over the last ten years, the Muslim population has grown ten times as fast as the rest of society. This has put an enormous pressure on society. Thanks to British politicians who have forgotten about Winston Churchill, the English now have taken the path of least resistance. They give up. They give in.
Thank you very much for letting me into the country. I received a letter from the Secretary of State for the Home Department, kindly disinviting me. I would threaten community relations, and therefore public security in the UK, the letter stated.For a moment I feared that I would be refused entrance. But I was confident the British government would never sacrifice free speech because of fear of Islam. Britannia rules the waves, and Islam will never rule Britain, so I was confident the Border Agency would let me through. And after all, you have invited stranger creatures than me. Two years ago the House of Commons welcomed Mahmoud Suliman Ahmed Abu Rideh, linked to Al Qaeda. He was invited to Westminster by Lord Ahmed, who met him at Regent’s Park mosque three weeks before. Mr. Rideh, suspected of being a money man for terror groups, was given a SECURITY sticker for his Parliamentary visit.
Well, if you let in this man, than an elected politician from a fellow EU country surely is welcome here too. By letting me speak today you show that Mr Churchill’s spirit is still very much alive. And you prove that the European Union truly is working; the free movement of persons is still one of the pillars of the European project.
But there is still much work to be done. Britain seems to have become a country ruled by fear. A country where civil servants cancel Christmas celebrations to please Muslims. A country where Sharia Courts are part of the legal system. A country where Islamic organizations asked to stop the commemoration of the Holocaust. A country where a primary school cancels a Christmas nativity play because it interfered with an Islamic festival. A country where a school removes the words Christmas and Easter from their calendar so as not to offend Muslims. A country where a teacher punishes two students for refusing to pray to Allah as part of their religious education class. A country where elected members of a town council are told not to eat during daylight hours in town hall meetings during the Ramadan. A country that excels in its hatred of Israel, still the only democracy in the Middle-East. A country whose capitol is becoming ‘Londonistan’.
I would not qualify myself as a free man. Four and a half years ago I lost my freedom. I am under guard permanently, courtesy to those who prefer violence to debate. But for the leftist fan club of islam, that is not enough. They started a legal procedure against me. Three weeks ago the Amsterdam Court of Appeal ordered my criminal prosecution for making ‘Fitna’ and for my views on Islam. I committed what George Orwell called a ‘thought crime’.
You might have seen my name on Fitna’s credit role, but I am not really responsible for that movie. It was made for me. It was actually produced by Muslim extremists, the Quran and Islam itself. If Fitna is considered ‘hate speech’, then how would the Court qualify the Quran, with all it’s calls for violence, and hatred against women and Jews? Mr. Churchill himself compared the Quran to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Well, I did exactly the same, and that is what they are prosecuting me for.
I wonder if the UK ever put Mr. Churchill on trial.
The Court’s decision and the letter I received form the Secretary of State for the Home Department are two major victories for all those who detest freedom of speech. They are doing Islam’s dirty work. Sharia by proxy. The differences between Saudi-Arabia and Jordan on one hand and Holland and Britain are blurring. Europe is now on the fast track of becoming Eurabia. That is apparently the price we have to pay for the project of mass immigration, and the multicultural project.
Ladies and gentlemen, the dearest of our many freedoms is under attack. In Europe, freedom of speech is no longer a given. What we once considered a natural component of our existence is now something we again have to fight for. That is what is at stake. Whether or not I end up in jail is not the most pressing issue. The question is: Will free speech be put behind bars?
We have to defend freedom of speech.
For the generation of my parents the word ‘London’ is synonymous with hope and freedom. When my country was occupied by the national-socialists the BBC offered a daily glimpse of hope, in the darkness of Nazi tyranny. Millions of my country men listened to it, illegally. The words ‘This Is London’ were a symbol for a better world coming soon. If only the British and Canadian and American soldiers were here.
What will be transmitted forty years from now? Will it still be ‘This Is London’? Or will it be ‘this is Londonistan’? Will it bring us hope, or will it signal the values of Mecca and Medina? Will Britain offer submission or perseverance? Freedom or slavery?
The choice is ours.
Ladies and gentlemen,
We will never apologize for being free. We will never give in. We will never surrender.
Freedom must prevail, and freedom will prevail.
Thank you very much.
Geert Wilders MPChairman, Party for Freedom (PVV)The Netherlands

Lord Ahmed- Why Labour’s search for ‘forced’ minority representation is shown to be flawed by the peer.

2009-02-26T20:34:00.001-08:00

This week Lord Ahmed was imprisoned for dangerous driving. Though his imprisonment may have been caused by his pushing buttons on his mobile-phone; he has in the past committed far graver offences against Parliament. Recently, he, inadvertently or not, attempted to create a possible mass public order offence, by stating that the presence of a Dutch MP would be met by something akin to muslim riots. Benjamin D’Israeli once set a bench-mark for decency in politics when he said: ‘I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many of the prejudices of the few’. Lord Ahmed has a lot to learn on that front, for he was doing quite the opposite. Perhaps, he felt that his own position was unsafe unless he was out slaying the myriad phantoms of discontent in his head. Through his visceral and ill-reflective manner of debate, he encouraged feelings of disenchantment amongst a few of the muslim community, rather than sought to reduce their fears and search for national and community solidarity. Instead of encouraging muslim vigilance and toleration when Geert Wilders MP was invited he was far too quickly and thoughtlessly up in arms ‘crying havoc'. He thus lost an opportunity to show those of us that are non-muslims and are sceptical about peaceful co-existence with Islamic communities that they are wrong, and that their fears are unfounded. His response was thus lacking in sound judgment and deliberation, questioning as to how much the Government had pondered a possible ‘band-wagon approach’ problem on appointment. His approach was particularly questionable as he himself had allowed a book-launch by a supposed anti-semite, Israel Shamir, in the Lord’s. This picking and choosing of speakers palatability belies a want of understanding of the importance of freedom of speech and intimates an agenda. It also indicates that this is perhaps not a man necessarily to be trusted with his self-appointed representation of British muslims.

There is also a graver and more worrying political issue here. Lord Ahmed became the Lord’s first Muslim Life Peer in 1998, a part of Blair’s search for minority representation in politics. This is a product of recent postive discrimination drives in political appointments, demonstrating the flaws in this unfair approach. Unfair, as it not only pushes out other candidates on the basis of background, but also deleterious as the better candidate is often marginalised. This positive discrimination approach can thus weaken the institution of appointment, as persons are chosen on representation as opposed to calibre. This problem is acute in other areas of appointment, including employment, which suffers from the malaise of interference by so called anti-discrimination laws. It may not be as clear a problem in political appointment to the Lords, which has much more to do with the current shambolic system of appointment to the upper chamber based on party whim. Positive discrimination encourages and re-inforces differences through unfair selection (a non-muslim, non-ethnic minority is thus not picked)that different racial and religious communities need their own representative factions in politics. This undermines the spirit of a singular national identity. Thus forced categorised representation enforces an existing divide that at present feasibly separates communities. We should, of course, be endeavouring to do the opposite. Simply put a policy that seeks a fair representation of ethnic and other minorities can also be harmful to community cohesion. Further, there is at present, perhaps, too much a drive for fair representation, that may leave such appointment processes open to abuse. Not all of our politics are such that we feel only comfortable if there are those from our own superficial ethnic sub-divisions in charge. Some of us, would rather choose someone more able from another back-ground, race or gender in positions of influence if it is in the best-interests of our country. In this spirit, the better of us may even prefer to elect those whom we do not like and those that also dislike us. A similar unfairness exists in the promotion of women over men, though unlike racial, ethic or relgious promotion it does not necessarily come with the same cost of community cohesion.

APG Pandya.

(The Birkenhead Society. The Birkenhead Society does not accept legal responsibility for the factual content or accuracy of its blog or website).

'Golliwog'- All those that are offended please apologise

2009-02-13T11:42:00.001-08:00

Over the last two weeks the story of Carol Thatcher's comment has been drizzled over the press like some overdone and excessively ascerbic vinegrette that often, inadvertently, floods one's caesar salad due to the chef's recklessness. Though foul tasting it might seem to some of us, at least to others, in taste, it may be rather quite different. The point being that offence is very much a matter of personal sensitivity and emotional sensibility, as opposed to something that one can have a fixed judgment on, say like rape. Further proscribing those that express themsleves in the way they wish to is an attack on liberty, as the freedom of choice of expression is very much a part of a human's personal autonomy, and thus dignity. To excoriate people for the intolerance of others, would create a nation in which relations between people were based on of mistrust of one another, if not fear. A nation that censures those who wish to express themsleves using a golliwog against political correctness, rather than an attack on race, is a mark of an intolerant nation.

Personally, I laughed. I told my uncle (who, like myself, has a rather dark complexion) that she was specifically referring to him. As a chair of a free-speech society my intuition was, of course, surprisingly rather different. But who would honestly not be embarresed by being offended by such a comment- it would be child like, surely? We Brits, we take it on the chin. Reading the papers day after day, I was looking for a list of apologies for those who were willing to own up to their childish reaction of 'I am offended'. But none was forthcoming.

The immaturity was put forward by those I expected. Some of the coloured lot of our society for starters (who seem to be suffering from some bout of self-induceable post-colonial race complex) and some left-leaning, quasi-liberal apologists. The rants of the former went along the following lines: That their forefathers had been slaves or governed by force or some other irrelevant and illogical gibberish, thus 'How could she?' 'Are you a slave?'I thought- then grinned, realising that, of course, another more subtle slavery was at work. This was the limit of a human mind that could only digest what it was not senstive to. What I would term 'obtuse perception'. It should become a psychiatric's diagnosis. 'I cannot accept this idea, or thought or speech as it makes me uncomfortable'- a fortiori, I am a child. Please treat me as one; censor all that affects me. And if that is the truth' well- who cares?' I'd rather not know than be offended. Of course, I am making a leap here, that between a statement or a piece of speech and an opinion. But are they so disparate? Does one not follow from the other? And if so, is to censor one not to censor the other? Since when has the nation of ideas and enlightenment become the nation of visceral censorship? We are, dangerously, heading that way. The decision of the Home Secretary to ban Geert Wilder, yesterday, is another example of this. We ban to stop people from being offended. We thus treat them like children, and the state then moves into that dangerous corridor when it can control ideas and opinion by approval or disapprobation. We need to treat both of these instances with more care and think deeply about the implications of this approach. Once we move into the realm of offence and violence, we move away from discussion and Parliamentary democracy and into the breakdown of the rule of law. In this only might is right, by virtue of offence, and those that are liberal and mature in their outlook with more reflective views get pushed on the way-side. With the loss of ideas becomes the loss of thought that can be valuable to our nation as a whole. For this reason we should preserve our hard fought freedom of speech with absolute rigidity-it is the catalyst that makes Parliamentary democracy (Government by choice and election) function. I would thus urge for those who are offended to grow up and apologise, as there is something more at stake here than their selfish, visceral sensitivities.

APG PANDYA
(Copyright Birkenhead Society).

Baby P- Time for complete judicial supervision?

2008-12-10T08:06:00.000-08:00

Five years ago I was assisting a senior member of the judiciary of the Court of Appeal during a seminal case of infant/child abuse before our courts, termed Re S Re W (see weblink). That case concerned the possibility of an implied power to courts to force children into care where there was a risk of abuse. This power would come from the right to life in the European Convention of Human Rights. The powers for judges to interpret laws according to the European Convention are derived from s.3 of the Human Rights Act. Thus the Children's Act and other related legislation could be interpretated to incorporate a principle of protecting the right of life for the child. The House of Lords rejected this approach on the grounds of judicial law-making, and taking the powers under the Human Rights Act to interpret statutes too far. However, the gap in judicial supervision of chidren and infants who suffer abuse was left unremedied by the Parliamentary process.

Prior to becoming a High Court judge, the judge had chaired a public inquiry on child abuse in 1989. The inquiry concerned the death of Tyra Henry who had died whilst under the care of Lambeth Council in 1988. Tyra had suffered physical asssault at the hands of her father. There was a distinct and continuous pattern of abuse that care-workers had become aware of. Everytime her parents met she would be beaten by her father. Though the social services and relevant care workers were aware of the relationship between her mother's meetings with her father and the violence, nothing was done. Eventually, she was killed by a physical assault by her father. There was no legal avenue available then, as there is not one now, for the doctors and care workers to refer such cases to a court for consideration. This would allow the court to prevent, insuch cases, the child from being present when the father would see the mother, by placing the child into emergency care. If a Court could have been seised by reference of the social workers or doctors and the judge had the power to grant an exclusionary order backed up by an imprisonable offence to contain the father, then such an abuse would have been prevented. Currently judges in the family courts have no power to order parents from seeing their own children or hear a reference by doctors or social workers as to the risk to a child. If any reform to prevent the Baby P scenario occuring again is made, such powers ought to be given to judges in those reforms. The reforms must include powers of reference to doctors and social workers who see the child.

There are several cases of previous child abuse that come to mind where such a proposal would be effective. Victoria Climbie's case resulted in several reforms brought in to the existing information network to do with recognising child abuse, but no real effective provisions as to how that information would be used. The public outrage at her death led to a public inquiry which produced major changes in child protection policies in the United Kingdom, including the formation of the Every Child Matters programme; the introduction of the Children Act 2004; the creation of the ContactPoint project, a planned government database that will hold information on all children in England and Wales; and the creation of the Office of the Children's Commissioner chaired by the Children's Commissioner. These were reforms, but they were reforms relating to information collection on the status of the welfare of children but none of these bodies has the power to step in and protect the child abused by an adult to the point where its very life is at risk. The EveryChildMatters programme is concerned with the general upbringing of the child, such as sports and other leisure activities and does not specifically cater for child abuse. Suprisingly, if not shockingly the Children's Act 2004 did not remedy the problem of compelling authorities to force children at high risk, those, for example, with visible marks that can be medically attributed to abuse, into care to protect their lives and for their general psychological well-being. This shocking omission led to the dithering concerning Baby P. Afterall social services will go around in circles if they cannot activiely get the law on their side to compel action. The real fault lies with the Labour Government for its ineffective and superficial response via the post Climbie measures.

The proposal of change here would allow doctors to be able to report such faults to an independent abuse or child officer to the family court. Such an officer needs to be set-up by legislation that in turn can be used by the judge to hold an investigation of his own motion. A radical step would be a list of short-term care homes or a list of families that are willing to take in the child until the court deems the risk of abuse is less, or the child is not a 'high risk' case. These will be social services approved, and then checked by the court for appropriateness prior to granting the order.

The UK has one of the most atrocious records for child abuse according to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child, in the world. Those that oppose such an interventionist approach often couch it in terms of an unnecessary intrusion into family life. But what family life? Can a child or infant in such a position of continously suffering violence really be said to have a family life? Or is the closer reality that the level of neglect is such that the Government has failed completely to protect the most vulnerable? We need to grow up on this issue and realise that such a proposal is not as drastic as it seems. It does not mean that parents who smack their children will loose them for a short-period. The power compelled by the court would be in extreme circumstances where there is a real and significant risk to the life of the child, and nothing short will suffice. Courts make decisions on life and death cases at present, and thus have the competence to do so. A recent example was a granting of an order to let hospitals operate on siamese twins, where one baby would no doubt lose its life but barring the intervention both would. This would be within our history of protecting children, we were one of the first countries in the world that outlawed child labour. Where life and suffering of the weak and innocent are concerned, and where those weak and innocent are children such a proposal should be pursued. It is not extreme but one that puts children who suffer from such appalling cowardly conduct out of harm. No civilised state should stand idly by and let the status-quo continue.

APG Pandya

(Copyright Birkenhead Society)

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200102/ldjudgmt/jd020314/inres-1.htm

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/labour/3126855/UN-to-criticise-Labours-record-on-child-rights.html&t=UN%20to%20criticise%20Labour%27s%20record%20on%20child%20rights%20&b=The%20United%20Nations%20is%20expected%20to%20criticise%20Labour%27s%20record%20on%20child%20rights%20in%20a%20key%20report.%20&m=News&s=compact

http://www.nspcc.org.uk/Inform/policyandpublicaffairs/Wales/briefings/UNCRCBriefing2008_wdf61519.pdf

Sharia law- On the road to madness?

2008-11-27T15:27:00.000-08:00

Interesting to see the piece on Stephen Hockman QC's views on Sharia law (as below, though it was the Birkenhead Society and not Islam4UK that organised the debate). Currently Sharia law is applied by lay tribunals for certain commercial and family disputes. Contrary to Stephen Hockmann QC's view that full sharia law needs to be brought in to prevent alienation of Moslems, there is a strong case to be made that its inclusion would have exactly the opposite effect. Its inclusion would lead to further fragmentation of the law and, in turn, a lack of social cohesion. This is because we would be enforcing and exacerbating the differences between communities by creating different laws for different people. This would further unedify the idea of nationhood and the importance of having a singular identity which is currently provided by having one law of the land.

A singular system of law protects a singular system of values, despite differences in view as to what some of those values might be. In a our democracy once one value is chosen through the political process it is the value we all adhere by. A simple example of this would be the making certain forms of fox-hunting illegal. Different systems of law would make enforcing the disparate systems extremely difficult, and would undermine the great values associated with traditional British democracy. It would also undermine the working of the Parliamentary process, that has a monopoly over the law where rule-making is done through debate and discussion. It would allow other
law-making processes to take place, and taken to the extreme, permit an oppressive law-making regime to function freely in a separate community or a separate part of the country.

The importance of having a singular law to govern people of differing races, cultures, and religions is vital to the functioning of any society, such as Britain, that values pluralism, the freedom of ideas and toleration. It is also important in providing social cohesion where there are peoples from varying backgrounds and culture, and to promote extra-ordinary values of the great intrinsic British culture and heritage. Further, only through a singular rule of law that is not arbitrary in its form, content or application can fair system of Government operate. This is particularly important where there is, as in Britain, different peoples from different backgrounds. The rule of a singular law provides the vital cohesion needed for a variety of people to work and function together. To bring about different rules to different parts of the populous is to fragment both state and society. It would leave open the possibility of apartheid, on the basis of ideas and culture. In turn this would encourage isolationism towards national interest and the lack of cohesiveness would unedify interest in the function of our nation state.

The alienation of the Moslem community from the mainstream of our society that a Sharia law would bring about would also increase further the chances of younger members of the Moslem community being radicalised. It would leave fundamental Islam unchecked as it would be left to be self-judged within a distinct system of values. The end result, due to enforced differences between community groups may lead to distrust, fear and loathing. The notion of one nation may quickly fade away.

Hockmann also conveniently forgets what radical forms of Islam stand for. Alienation and abuse of women are rife amongst some countries that follow Islamic law. These proposals would leave open the risk of marginalising progressive and moderate Moslems who wish to practice their religion through our secular state. It would leave to rot Moslem women who have been campaigning for reform in their own community and through the world through the platform provided by British liberalism. If radical elements of Islam are to be dealt with, then giving a carte blanche to unlimited application of the Sharia is certainly not the way forward.

On the other-side of the spectrum there is a need to evaluate whether the rise of political support for other extreme groups such as the BNP is linked to the institutional quasi-liberalism that Hockmann represents. Quasi-liberalism is being liberal for the sake of liberal and forgetting the responsibility of making a value-judgment. The rise of the far right is another form of fragmentation that undermines the cohesive of the nation state. It may bring plurality, but at the cost of undermining that which the plurality of ideas is supposed to serve- the nation state. This is by giving further unneeded assistance to extremism. Quasi-liberalism of this type is not Gladstonian liberalism. It is a form of gratuitous sentiment that has no regard to the large historical processes that gave rise to the nation state, and alienates its people by forgetting or disregarding their history and culture. Thus quasi-liberalism of leading figures such as Hockmann fuels extremism, such as that found in the BNP, by undermining the British identity.

Britain is an extra-ordinary country with a unique and powerful history. It needs to remain one nation in order to promote its political ideals of free-speech, toleration and democracy to the world. The unedification of disparate legal systems does not have to be brought in to undermine this. Mr Hockmann QC needs to sit down and re-think the implications of his suggestions on such a difficult and complex issue.

(For Hockman QC’s views: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/3523672/Sharia-law-should-be-introduced-into-legal-system-says-leading-barrister.html)
APG Pandya ©

QUESTIONING A JUDGE’S RIGHT TO PUBLIC DEFENCE:

2008-11-19T05:01:00.000-08:00

It is worth noting, see link below, that Lord Pannick last week in the House of Lords proposed that judges should be able to speak out against criticism given to them by politicians. I respectfully disagree as there are inherent dangers with respect to this. This would open the back door for judicial intervention into politics. This would be unconstitutional as it would permit unelected officials to have a say in matters of politics and public policy. This politicisation of the judicial role also undermine the independence of the judiciary.

The comment in question was made with respect to Paul Dacre’s criticisms of Sir David Eady, judge of the High Court of England and Wales. Sir David Eady has interpreted British libel law to ban a book, namely Rachel Enhrenfeld’s ‘Funding Evil’. This is a powerful act that inveighs against our inherent right of free-speech in Britain that has taken several centuries to develop. One has to look no further back than ear-cropping of those who wrote against Elizabeth I, to understand what a struggle it was to establish freedom of speech in this country.

It is no doubt very likely that an activity of judges will be of interest to public and political opinion. However, for judges to have to defend their judgments from public opinion would undermine the integrity and independence of the legal system. I very much hope that the power of the judge in making libel law is thoroughly questioned by politicians and the media, and that judges are aware of the heavy criticism that follows. Libel law in its most draconian form can be used to excoriate and supress genuine opinion, where it is not factual - and this has the danger of concomitantly suppressing the freedom of speech. Paul Dacre was right to scrutinise Sir David Eady, and appropriately there can be no recourse for the judge. It is for Parliament to put right any inappropriate wondering of the judge as it sees fit, and not for the judge to defend him or herself.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/lawreports/joshuarozenberg/3480379/Privacy-judge-only-doing-his-duty-says-peer.html

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article3756954.ece

For Lord Pannick's views: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200708/ldhansrd/text/81118-
> 0016.htm

APG Pandya

Be wary of the President who wants 'peace'.

2008-11-05T09:13:00.000-08:00

Now, finally, Islamic fundamentalism has the President of its choice. Obama believes in peace and that's such a great thing isn't it? Suspicions and raised eyebrows should start there. Obama campaigned on removing US troops from Iraq, content in leaving the Iraqi people; with a half-finished, half-baked job; at the hands of militants. The threat of Islamic terrorism is as great now as ever, yet Obama the pacifist, will defeat them all with a sigh of peace. He thinks the fanatics will suddenly decide to stop waging the war because he wishes to remove and reduce US presence in both theatres. He is too naïve to realise that they do not hate for the sake of hating but for the destruction of the liberal West, that the US was just as much a risk from them the day before 9/11 as the day after. He doesn't quite grasp the geopolitics of territorial presence and influence. If the West is going to fight Islamic fascism, then a territorial foothold in the Middle East and Afghanistan has to be maintained for security and protection. The possibility to influence a move towards modern democratic governments in other states in the Middle East should not be lost. The Iranians are no doubt amused, that the voice of peace may finally give their nuclear programme the implicit consent it needs to carry on, whilst they live in a dictatorial regime that curtails fundamental freedoms with state sponsored censorship and does little to protect the rights of women. I still remember Obama’s keenness, early in the election, of wanting to get into bed with Ahmejinedad. This instinctive palm-greasing is a dangerous sign. It is the mark of a man who is willing to be a philanderer with integrity in order to gain on a desire to be liked. The possibility of Obama using US influence to change the world for the better, such as a voice for freedom, remains extremely dubious.

The election itself was a disgrace. I have never seen human beings pander in such a vile way to the lowest common denominator of race in an electoral process. Voting for someone because they are black, is as vile as voting for them because they are white, or pink or brown. If one looks beyond the man’s complexion there is very little in Obama’s empty rhetoric- How exactly is going to change the gulf between the rich and the poor that was made obvious by the faces suffering from Hurricane Katrina? He has never outlined any clear method of doing so, the electorate falling for nothing more than flamboyant vacuosity. McCain ran a terrible campaign, by god it was awful. Whilst going on about his war wounds, he never bothered to explain in full why they made him a better candidate. He had no clear game plan for a recession and did not seem wary of it. But then neither did Obama. What exactly is the President’s plan barring an increase of taxes? And is that even the right solution? When people are asked why they voted for him, it’s because of ‘change’. It is difficult to find a more empty and shallow proposition wanting of consideration than that. What and how are not questioned, spoken of, or asked about, hence their delivery becomes near impossible to assess. I am glad to have an ‘African-American’ one said. As if one was trying to bury an old hatchet in some way, it is childish and unedifying to formulate one’s opinions in this way. I would have been embarrassed. Does the choice of Obama for the reason of race mark the dawn of a new era, or reaffirm the existence of an age old apartheid? Obama's victory is a telling sign that many Americans could not see beyond the race issue, and failed to distinguish McCain, a radical in the Republican camp, from the President that was Bush. But the Republicans had fought a war and won, and only the most complacent of Americans have forgotten how important that was to corroborating US Security post 9/11. Once Obama pursues his campaign of peace fully, it is the Islamic fundamentalists that would have been the real victors of last night. They know that peace and toothlessness are one and the same.

APG Pandya.

In the middle of a global financial heart attack...

2008-10-11T12:33:00.000-07:00

In the middle of a global financial heart attack,
where is our Dr. House? By Douglas Bulloch.

The plot will be familiar. An unusual presentation of otherwise routine symptoms perks the interest of your favourite fictional genius doctor. Preliminary investigations are followed by treatments that seem to clear up the initial problem, but then the patient collapses and her organs start to fail one after the other. Dr. House then breaks every medical rule in the book in a desperate race against time when, after a suitable interval, he is touched by genius and identifies the original cause, either curing the patient with a couple of aspirin, or reconciling them with their inevitable death.

As with HBO medical drama, so with the global financial crisis. Right now we are in the organ failure stage, and desperately trying to treat the symptoms, but the diagnostic discussions are angry, vengeful and completely unresolved. Politicians around the world are agreeing with every proffered solution for the sake of unity, yet masking their ignorance behind an escalating range of worthless metaphors. Now is not the time to debate the origins of the crisis, they say, but the time to solve it. This position is exactly wrong. The cure depends upon identifying the cause, and until we recognise the cause of this problem, we are doomed to exacerbate it.

The first range of explanations that need to be dispensed with are those of a moral dimension. These cross the political divide. Those on the left blame greedy bankers, and those on the right, feckless borrowers. Neither has any bearing on the problem we are faced with today. Bankers have always been greedy, and heartless, stingy, even cruel. But it is because of these characteristics that they are trusted to look after other people’s hard earned money, not in spite of them. On the other hand, fecklessness is nothing new. Give a ne’er do well money, and he’ll fritter it away without thought for tomorrow. The problem has less to do with the phenomenon of the new super-rich class of banker, nor the sub-prime mortgage defaulter who never had the ability to repay. Both are the unknowing beneficiaries or victims of an excess of money.

Nor is the problem one of regulation or direct political interference. It is true that the Clinton administration pressured banks into offering loans to people of a dubious credit history and limited means. But as long as this was understood and underwritten as a scheme for the redistribution of wealth, there needn’t have been any problem. It may have failed, it may indeed have been expensive, but it is no more the cause of economic meltdown than Enron, the Dotcom bust, or the Iraq War. The toxic debt they produced was at least potentially quantifiable, whereas the ongoing collapse in the value of all property and global equities is not. Furthermore, lack of regulation may be an easy soundbite, but it is rarely accompanied by any estimation of exactly what regulations would prevent a ten-year asset boom followed by its sudden collapse. And it takes no notice of the fact that we have a brand new regulatory institution in London, empowered in accordance with all the latest thinking on financial regulation.

The problem is macro-economic, and if Dr. House were having his moment of realisation he would see that we have been here before, many times. What is more, the cause of the current problem would have been addressed – if not understood – by that most famous of literary simpletons, Chauncey Gardiner. In the film of Jerzy Kosinski‘s short story ‘Being There’, Peter Sellers plays Chance the Gardener, a man who was taken in as a child and brought up in the household of a wealthy man. He never learnt to read or write, only ever worked in the garden, and watched television obsessively, continually changing the channel to receive a stream of fragmentary slogans, songs, and pictures. He was, in short, without personality, an empty vessel devoid of all meaningful content, and after the death of his benefactor was thrown out into an entirely unfamiliar world, which he had only seen in pieces through his television screen. Everyone he met inferred enormous meaning into his gnomic comments, such that he ended up on television advising the President of the United States on economic policy. Drawing on the only knowledge he had, he said that in a garden, first there is spring, then summer, autumn and winter. Then after winter there is spring again. This was interpreted as a comment on the business cycle, and offered by the President as reassurance to a nation in the depths of an unspecified economic crisis.

Only later was it discovered that Chauncey Gardiner was a complete simpleton, but by then he had been elected to head up a major corporation. None of this is to suggest that what we need is a simpleton in charge of the World’s largest economy, however, the roots of this problem are indeed simple, even if the effects are extraordinarily complex.

The underlying problem stems from attempts to control or contain the business cycle. Growth, if it is real growth has to go in phases. There must be periods of consolidation in which costs are trimmed processes rationalised and strategies re-examined. If legislators attempt to delay a downturn they do two things. First of all, they sustain firms that have grown accustomed to inefficient business practices, and by doing so, weaken the whole economy. Secondly, they exacerbate the consequences of the eventual downturn.

The particular manner in which the current business downturn was deferred until now was particularly pernicious. We now know that keeping interest rates low in order promote growth fuelled a credit boom that drove up the price of assets and equities. If this had happened in one isolated economy, then this would have fed through to inflation fairly quickly, as rising property prices inevitably feed through to a rise in living costs, and impact on production and distribution costs. But in a context of rapid globalisation, consumer prices were further held down by the lowering of average labour costs through the transfer of manufacturing capacity to Asia.

The past ten or so years have seen the mature phase of this process play out before our eyes. 1997 saw the deliberate lowering of interest rates in the face of the Asian currency crisis, for which Alan Greenspan was hailed as a genius. This strategy was repeated on numerous occasions and global growth kept moving forward, investment flows accelerated on the back of cheap debt, trade imbalances ballooned, property prices kept on going upwards.

Now we face the prospect of unsustainable levels of debt secured against hugely overvalued assets – similar to the problems faced by Latin America economies in the 1980s – and as the assets fall in value, so increasing amounts of debt becomes bad debt; the sub-prime category was merely the lowest hanging fruit. Greedy bankers played their role in all of this, as did feckless borrowers, but the underlying problem was the artificial lowering of the price of credit by the US Federal Reserve – and by extension many other central banks – in an ingenious reinvention of Keynesian economics. Debt is after all just another kind of printed money. Bad debt especially so.

One way to avoid this would have been to have truly independent Central Banks which set their own measure of what constitutes inflation, including property prices. To his credit Mervyn King has been warning about unsustainable levels of both debt and property prices for years, although he had no power to act against them. Another suggestion would be to measure GDP by netting off accumulated debt, thus debt fuelled growth would be excluded from economic indicators, and Gordon Brown’s ‘end to Tory boom and bust’ would have been exposed as a sham from day one.

Keynes famously remarked that, in the long run, we are all dead. However, the philosophical truth of this remark should be measured against its economic meaning. The ‘long run’ in economics indicates an abstract point in the future, in which all assumptions concerning what is fixed are held to become variable. What he meant when he said this was rhetorically the same as the politicians currently urging action before considering the cause of the current problems; in other words, we are faced with problems that we need to solve, the ‘long run’ consequences are the problems others will have to solve tomorrow. The trouble is tomorrow always comes, and as a rule of thumb, the economic ‘long run’ looks to be about ten years, not so ‘long’ after all.

The current efforts to provide liquidity to the banks are understandable, and probably necessary, but the deferment of any analysis of the origins of this problem will lead to outcomes economists would describe as ‘sub-optimal’ – in English, catastrophic. Of the many things that need to be understood and acted upon, almost all of them have been known about for years, including these simple, if unpalatable truths: Milton Friedman’s Nobel Prize was well deserved. The business cycle is our friend. Retail Price Inflation (RPI) is not the same thing as real inflation. Central Banks cannot control real inflation by measuring only parts of it. Economics is quite simple really. Simple problems can be solved by a simpleton. And beware of anything you don’t understand.

When Dr. House sees symptoms that he does not understand, he investigates, even beyond the point of death, in order to find their cause. In our race to treat the symptoms of this global financial crisis, we must not forget the cause. Government ownership of the banks, liquidity injections, and reductions in interests rates may count as life support for the time being, but in the ‘long run’ we need to let the banks get back to banking – rather than laundering deliberate debt inflation – rehabilitate the business cycle, and learn to live within our means.

© Douglas Bulloch
Researcher, International Relations Department, London School of Economics.

Russia's Georgian Rampage

2008-08-18T18:25:00.000-07:00

Did anyone hear about what Miliband or Brown had to say whilst the Russians were on their excursion into Georgia? No. Because, whilst the crisis raged, they didn't say anything. They were probably hiding under their beds wishing like a child, that the horrible monster would just disappear. Now they can just pretend it was shadows caused by the light through the window. Did any eminent international lawyer dare stick a head above the parapet? No, incase one day the whole thing ends up in court and they might be precluded from representing either side. Only David Cameron responded appropriately and firmly to the lawless actions by Russia. Who needs to seek a Security Council resolution these days to justify the use of force? The council is irrelevant- we might as well say the truth and state that the whole thing is defunct and perhaps only useful when the little countries are being a bit naughty. Then only of use to satisfy the loopy lefty tree-huggers that we are doing something. Converse to the recent Russian actions, at least with regard to the NATO air-strikes in Kosovo, Security Council Resolutions 1119 and 1203 talked of a 'humanitarian catastrophe' and thus provided some legitimate basis upon which to act. As far as the so called genocide and other humanitarian breaches putatively claimed by Russia, they were so axiomatic and clear cut that it was worth not even bothering tabling them at the UN. One state can subjectively decide by itself and the whole system will operate better that way. A global community based on tit-for-tat is far more sensible idea, one is inclined to agree with Mr. Putin.
One might be forgiven for thinking that the borders of another sovereign state are supposed to inviolable since the drafting of the UN Treaty, yet we have one country who seems to think that is irrelevant. No one dares stand up to the menace and threat this action is to the sovereign equality of states and the long term protection of that principle.
To be honest the Security Council has not been on best behaviour since the end of the cold war. Its mandate is to maintain ‘international peace and security’ under the UN Charter. It has used this, dubiously, to build courts such as the International tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International tribunal for Rwanda. These tribunals brought in alien international criminal rules to try persons that had little or no idea that such rules existed. Legitimacy was assumed on the basis that a few utopian idealists thought it was the moral thing to do. The consent of either state to this system was wholly ignored, despite state consent being the cornerstone of the UN charter and international law. The Security Council went further in its desire to intervene in matters that seemed to be internal affairs of states. In 1994, through the passing of Resolution 940, it would decide what type of Government ought to be present in Haiti, when the dictator baby-doc brought a coup to the democratically elected Government. That was, perhaps, a good thing if one weighs the morality of democracy over the legitimacy of the Council in acting in this way. However, there was a lack of consistency in this approach. This was, of course, conveniently forgotten when the fraudulent dictator Mugabe demanded a second election through sheer brutal use of violence. No action was sought, express or implied when the janjaweed were bashing Sudanese villages to pieces from the Security Council. The use of force in Iraq 2003 was justified with complex, difficult arguments of implied authorisations (those that the Council does not state expressly) based on Security Council resolutions passed over a decade earlier. Despite the soundness of these contentions, what the lawyers that backed the war failed to realize is that there comes a point when sophistry of a legal argument is so great that it undermines its credibility. Such circumstances, as Iraq, demonstrate the clear lack of uniformity of the system, as there is no consensus of values amongst its states. Those who criticize the system excessively forget that the Security Council or the UN was not designed to be a cohesive system of accountability of states. The system was designed to defer largely to will of states. There has always been a clear disparity of values between far too many states for a cohesive, uniform and practical international institution to work. Perhaps it is time for a league of democracies to form their own separate institution with distinct values, where real economic sanctions will have effect and isolationism hurts those intransigent states hard. Or a system based on accountability with a court whose judgments can be enforced against assets of states who violate the principles in other states. The system’s weaknesses were hidden by the cold-war. It was not used in that period as security could not, ironically, have been left to a neutral international institution with a power to make real hard enforceable law. State sovereignty, at the cost of accountability, has been preserved often to justify a human tribal insecurity of placing one’s nation free of the possibility of commonly agreed rules. It was only the complacent that thought that after the end of the cold war the real battle for ideas and values had been won. In fact, as the conflicts and regime changes in the 1990s showed, it had just begun and that one without further firm action today from Western democratic states is at risk of being lost through inexcusable complacent apathy.

During the Georgian crisis the US, France and the UK have just watched, not Georgia of course, but the convenient distraction of the Olympics. Even most of the papers in the UK had the games as the leading story not the pouding that a small ex-Soviet state received. The answer to why this is of course is simple: We believe that Churchill was wrong in the 1939-40, and we wish, very sensibly deep in our hearts, that the job had been given to Lord Halifax.The cowardice of complacency is so much better than the virtue of courage. Winston, you were a rotter, how dare one have the spirit to act. There's a lesson here for Herr Hitler too. Better have given the gold to Jesse Owens whilst one is busy invading Poland.

The taboo of blasphemy...

2008-08-07T17:54:00.000-07:00

A post by Dr M Niblett

Those of us old enough to remember will recall that it will be twenty years next month since the publication of Sir Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, a novel which has achieved the rare distinction of being famed more for the reaction it provoked than its content. For the first time since the age of enlightenment, British booksellers were the subject of firebomb attacks for selling 'blasphemous' material, and citizens witnessed book burnings by angry mobs on public streets. On our television screens, we saw news stories in which translators of the book overseas were murdered and stabbed. This was the Britain into which the university students of today were born.

Astonishingly, following these activities, the largest booksellers in the UK withdrew the book from public view. Elsewhere, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, suggested that the blasphemy laws needed to be extended in order to limit criticism of Islam. For religious radicals, it was apparent that it was the rule of the mob, and not the rule of law, that was best placed to achieve their goal of censorship. At the same time, authorities in Britain demonstrated that they were quite prepared to abandon liberal democratic values for the false promise of the quiet life. It was the beginning of a brave new world.

Twenty years on, and we are an older, if not a wiser generation. Sir Salman has not yet been murdered by fanatics (though this owes much to living under 24-hour-a-day protection from armed guards), and The Satanic Verses can still be found on the shelves of most British bookshops. But the lesson learned by religious (and particularly Islamic) fanatics - that mob anger could induce self-censorship throughout large swathes of society - has gone unchecked.

Nowhere has this been illustrated more clearly in recent times than through the reaction in Western nations to the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, first published in September 2005. In Britain, veterans of the Rushdie affair, together with new recruits, marched on London carrying placards proclaiming 'Slay those who insult Islam'. Later, the present Archbishop of Canterbury offered proposals similar to those of Runcie in favour of amending the blasphemy laws to cover 'thoughtless or cruel speech' against all religions, including Islam. No mainstream British publication dared print the offending material (with the exception of the Spectator). But on this occasion we were able to witness how the cancer of religious censorship had spread to other Anglophone nations, a point I was reminded of today with Ezra Levant's acquittal in the Canadian cartoons case.

Levant, the first person to be prosecuted for blasphemy in Canada for more than 80 years, was accused of 'illegal' discrimination for reprinting the Danish Mohammed cartoons in his magazine, the Western Standard. His statement of defence can be watched here. Admittedly, his trial took place in a pseudo-court, a 'Human Rights' commission with special legal powers, and not in a criminal or civil court. But the road to such pseudo-courts has already been opened in Britain with the establishment of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights in 2007, an organisation which a number of human rights lawyers would like to see acquiring similar powers to its sister body in Canada.

In today's National Post, Levant remarks:

Some 900 days after I became the only person in the Western world charged with the “offence” of republishing the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, the government has finally acquitted me of illegal “discrimination.” Taxpayers are out more than $500,000 for an investigation that involved fifteen bureaucrats at the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The legal cost to me and the now-defunct Western Standard magazine is $100,000.

The case would have been thrown out long ago if I had been charged in a criminal court, instead of a human rights commission. That’s because accused criminals have the right to a speedy trial. Accused publishers at human rights commissions do not.
And if I had been a defendant in a civil court, the judge would now order the losing parties to pay my legal bills. Instead, the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities won’t have to pay me a dime. Neither will Syed Soharwardy, the Calgary imam who abandoned his identical complaint against me this spring.
Both managed to hijack a secular government agency to prosecute their radical Islamic fatwa against me — the first blasphemy case in Canada in over 80 years. Their complaints were dismissed, but it is inaccurate to say that they lost: They got the government to rough me up for nearly three years, at no cost to them. The process I was put through was a punishment in itself — and a warning to any other journalists who would defy radical Islam.

As Levant points out, this is hardly a victory for freedom of the press, since the whole case rested on the whim of a certain Pardeep Gundara, a low-level bureaucrat who judged whether Levant had provided enough 'context' in order for the discrimination charge to be dropped. At stake was no criminal issue, but whether Levant's actions had offended a particular religious sect. He is unlikely to be the last Canadian journalist prosecuted in this way for insulting Islamic sensibilities, but the costs he has had to endure will be enough to dissuade most journalists from following in his path.

Unfortunately for residents in Britain, such self-censorship applies even without the shadowy presence of these quasi-legal institutions. In perhaps the most absurd instance, at Clare College, Cambridge, a student was investigated by the police and disciplined by University of Cambridge authorities for daring to print the cartoon in a student magazine. Since the Satanic Verses controversy erupted, it appears that our authorities have become more timid in the face of religious outrage, not less. Let us hope that there are, somewhere out there, plenty of British Ezra Levants waiting in the wings, willing to challenge the taboo of blasphemy.

Apathy in the armed forces, a sign of maligned youth and politics

2008-08-01T19:26:00.000-07:00

This is a guest post by Mr Simon Paul

Following the recent report by The Times into the historic absence of morale in the armed forces, an investigation is required into the cause of this unnerving phenomenon. The proximate cause is, of course, the strain of fighting two wars simultaneously, with a military ill equipped for such adventure. But it is also the specific nature of those conflicts that has engendered such an unprecedented disaffection amongst our fighting forces. Iraq demonstrated that the polity will no longer blithely follow their leaders into the abyss; competence de guerre is questioned on all fronts. But it is not just the polity at large that entertains this new spirit of moral enquiry. Statesmen would do well to acknowledge that the debate on when and whether the use of force is just needs to be had in the public domain, as well as in the chamber of the House of Commons. The dark forces of the twentieth century compelled man towards a new moral agenda, that could barely countenance the use of force, excepting the most grievous circumstances. But the UN model of self-defence ceded its authority to the warning sounds of human rights - and thus was born the doctrine of humanitarian intervention. It is crass to say that the use of force by British governments on behalf of a third party is some kind of post-imperial harbinger. Those who enter debates on warfare should do so with appropriate gravity, and leave such cynicism at the door of the chamber. Those who have the power to provide aid must see it as their duty to do so. But it is the murkiness of this sentiment that has confounded the British public. Tony Blair attempted to elucidate this new doctrine in his infamous Chicago speech. But, rather than obey his own strictures, his carefully articulated criteria of just intervention were inflated to accommodate virtually any Westminster fiat.

Now the seeds of doubt have crept into the nerve centre. The role of a soldier has historically been peculiar. It is rarely the duty of an individual soldier to weigh up the moral worth of his military actions , despite a regular imbibement of the basic premises of humanitarian law . But convention may be more of a potent force than duty. It is a fine tribute to the worth of our fighting forbears, that the gross suffering of the Great Wars has yielded a widespread pacifism. But soldiers are no longer respected; they are suffered as a curious sub-culture within the pacific polity; they are ostracised, and they must move in their own circles. This dichotomy is beginning to take its toll. Besides suffering from lack of funding, the soldier will suffer more greatly when he is starved of the 'soft support' that is so essential to his success as a professional, and his contentment as a human. This is just another symptom of how lost we are as a nation. In the strange consitutional welter that is modern Britain, all sectors balk at the use of words such as 'right and wrong' (excepting David Cameron, who has only recently appropriated that most worthy of niches). And this fear of moral judgement is no less prominent when directed at the use of force.

When I discuss the ethics of war with my young peers, the prevailing mood is that war can never be just. And if war can never be just, it can never be justified. The presumption against violence is almost universal. To phrase it in such terms elevates the sentiment - and it would certainly be a worthy and defeasible position were it arrived it by a useful measure of academic scepticism. But I fear that is not the case. It is cynicism that leads to this presumption; a cynicism that is the product of inadequate investigation. The facts have not been presented in a robust manner, and in so doing, the presumption against violence - worthy sentiment! - has concealed a much worthier and historically sympathetic presumption: that against injustice. The horrors of twentieth century warfare have exposed the use of force to be brutal and indiscriminate. But this should never detract from the fact that our moral judgements should always be couched in terms of justice and injustice. Indeed, to neglect this distinction, and to presume that violence can never have a noble end is to condemn our soldiers to the realm of irretrievable inhumanity. No wonder, then, that the support that a soldier cherishes is at present so cruelly withheld.

I would say this is a failure of education. Patriotism has become something of a dirty word. Current guidance on citizenship lessons requires students to focus on diversity, globalisation and the role of the United Nations and European Union. That is all very well and good. But we would do better to educate our students in the world as it is, not the world as the Labour Party thinks it should be. For whilst we live in a system of states, patriotism will remain a virtue. It is a virtue that does, though, require a redefinition, and careful separation from nationalism. It must be the first duty of an educational system to instruct its subjects in the history of their land. Now this is not because 'we used to have an Empire, you know, and Empires are jolly good things...'. To suggest that teaching the history of this country from the perspective of this country is an imperial action is worse than laughable. It is morally wrong. It is because we are afraid that people are not able to form the right moral judgments that history is presented in a furtive and roundabout manner. But this absence of trust has a price: moral judgments are made in a vacuum.

My proposals for the remedy of this problem are twofold: draft a constitution of the military of this country, reflecting its aspirations and intentions, and a renewed focus on British history in schools. We must all of us be aware that there are instances that require the use of force in the service of justice. To neglect this important point is to appease the darkness. We must all of us reflect upon the singular evil of Nazism, and the triumph of the Allies. We must also be aware of the excesses of that war: Dresden, the misplaced efforts of Bomber Command. But our engagement with this history must never cede truth to relativism. For there are moral truths; I will tell you one: Hitler was evil. And if you think that is a commonplace, then may I suggest that Hitler's status as evildoer is growing increasingly tenuous by the day. I was discussing this matter with a friend of mine. I had contemplated a military career. Her response was intriguing: "I don't think anything justifies the taking of a life". I responded that I think there are some things worth dying for. Had she not been a friend, and the conversation amiable, I would have pointed out what an insult that was to those who died protecting the liberties that we savoured in that very conversation. But then she said: the only worthwhile battles are those of ideas. And ideology never merits death. She was half correct. Today, more often than not, the only worthwhile battles are battles over ideas. Thus, to say they are not worth dying for is false , misconceived and demonstrates the ostracisation of modern youth from the true value of modern democracy. This being the ability to form and discuss ideas, openly, honestly and without restriction. I would venture to suggest that ideas are almost the only thing worth dying for. Perhaps, in these times, where are own moral and ideological values of the west are at risk, they are to be placed on parallel and integrated into the needs of foreign policy, and placed above short-term domestic political gain of the incumbent Government.