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

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.

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.

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-à-vis tariffs are negligible, so that most areas of the world no longer have effective barriers to prevent trade. The rise of investment treaties in the last two decades (from over 50 to several thousand) has virtually ended the concept of market barriers. This renders benefits of exclusivity or preference to the Euro-zone for trade and investment dubious, and frees states from being ensconced in international institutions for trade to more global choices in line with global market liberalisation.


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

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

Social mobility takes a kicking under the coalition

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

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

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

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

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

Abhijit P.G. Pandya
Copyright Birkenhead Society.

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

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