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
Sunday, 20 March 2011
Monday, 21 February 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
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.
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.
Sunday, 6 February 2011
The danger of the EU hedge fund directive, is to enervate the hedge fund market itself.
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
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
Saturday, 5 February 2011
Monnet, Schuman and the myth that it was the avoidance of war that motivated the founding fathers of Europe
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.
Wednesday, 2 February 2011
Muslims who can’t take a joke are ‘cultural terrorists’ – Shame on those that have attacked Mr Donnelly
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.
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.
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
Consecutive Conservative and Labour Governments betrayed Britain’s young Muslims when they chose segregation over assimilation.
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.
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.
Thursday, 20 January 2011
My dear Baroness Warsi- Is it hightime to revive the Medieval Starchamber?
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
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
Sunday, 2 January 2011
Does Anthony Blunt make the case to pull out of 'Additional Protocol 13' of the European Convention of Human Rights?
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.
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.
Tuesday, 21 December 2010
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
If you don’t believe water-boarding convicted terrorists is right; then you simply haven’t joined the real world.
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.
Sunday, 31 October 2010
David Cameron failed in Brussels on Friday because he doesn’t realise that they need us more than we need them.
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-Ã -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.
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-Ã -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.
Sunday, 10 October 2010
Social mobility takes a kicking under the coalition
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.
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.
Monday, 13 September 2010
We must stop bashing bankers if we are to regenerate the economy.
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.
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.
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
Easy Quiz: Who is the most racist MP in the House of Commons? Ans. Diane Abbott.
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
Tuesday, 1 June 2010
When the last flames of Erastianism become embers, the West will fall.
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
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
Monday, 31 May 2010
Irresponsible international relations prejudging Israel over the gaza flotilla.
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
Copyright Abhijit P.G. Pandya 2010
Copyright Birkenhead Society 2010
Monday, 17 May 2010
Why we should leave the EU- The simple and forgotten truth of its redundancy, and a worrying future ahead.
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.
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.
Saturday, 13 February 2010
Why the human rights lawyers are the ‘true anti-liberals’.
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.
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.
Saturday, 12 December 2009
Climate Change- The Beginning of decline and fall, and the end of the Enlightenment in British Parliamentary Politics.
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.
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.
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