A neo-Jacobin

Environmental correctness - a new religion?

2009-03-04T14:18:00.003+01:00

I would call myself a secularist, who is quite happy to tolerate the existence of all the other various religious denominations – even the relatively new, secular religion - environmentalism.

Is it fair to label environmentalism as a ‘new’ religion?

Emile Durkheim, in his famous sociological text The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, defined religion as ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all of those who adhere to them’. What strikes me about Durkheim’s definition is the lack of reference to God, or gods, nor does he mention spirituality, or other worlds. For Durkheim, religion is essentially the social construction of the sacred: this unites its apologists and adherents into a ‘single moral community’. The contemporary environmentalist movement has much in common with Durkheim’s definition of a ‘single moral community’.

A few weeks ago, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband MP, flanked by senior Bishops announced their campaign for a ‘carbon fast’ during the next forty days of Lent. Yes, it’s a cheap eco-friendly publicity stunt, done in order to endow everyday environmental behaviour with a sense of religious authority. Such stunts highlight the fact that apologists of environmentalist causes care less about the actual management of nature, than they do about launching moral crusades – not to alter the earth mind you, but to micro-manage human behaviour like never before.

‘Carbon emission’ is fast becoming the new original sin of our age, for which us humans must seek redemption. According to the Archbishop, Dr Rowan Williams, for Lent we need to ‘live more simply and cherish more deeply the creation of which we are only a part’. Carbon fasting has now become a way to absolve yourself of all your 'carbon sins' - sinful rituals like driving to work, or using the dishwasher or washing machine are viewed as immoral acts to be reigned in.

William Swatos, the editor of the International Journal of Research on Religion argues that environmentalism, as an ideology, has the potential to ‘serve as an implicit religion’. Ian Plimer, a professor of Geology argued recently that environmentalism is on par with ‘Creationism’.

Peter Beyer, the author of Religion and Globalization makes the point that what we are currently witnessing is the steady rise, and rise, and ‘upsurge’, of what he describes as ‘contemporary religious environmentalism’. According to Beyer, there are at least three different styles of ‘eco-religiosity’, that he claims were born during the hazy, hippy days of Woodstock.

The author, Michael Crichton goes further, he argues that environmentalism is ‘one of the most powerful religions in the Western World’. Crichton makes a rather good point when he reminds his readers of past environmental predictions that have had serious factual flaws – like, for example the banning of DDT. Crichton aptly describes the banning as one of the ‘most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century’ – and I agree. The ban has directly caused the death of millions of African people, mainly children – all in the name of environmentalism. Environmentalism must be a religion – indeed, why else would environmentalists be in such denial over the millions of deaths they caused due to the ban?

Dr David Orrell, a Canadian based mathematician, argues that when it comes to making future predictions based on models the ‘track record of any kind of long-distant prediction is really bad’. Orrell added that ‘scientists cannot even write the equation of a cloud, let alone make a workable model of the climate’.

Instead of putting forward proposals for more investment in research and innovation, environmentalists and Church leaders appear happier to moralise about our varied lifestyles and habits – and of course, none of this desperate search for moral coherence will actually help to improve the environment.

UK thought police almost running amok

2009-02-12T18:34:00.005+01:00

I always think its preferable that people should say exactly what they are thinking, even if it is prejudiced – indeed, it is far better to just come out with it, than keeping it in, so to speak.

However, it appears, we in Britain, are living in very thin-skinned and over-sensitive times. This year alone, a week hasn’t gone by without some high profile celebrity being sacked from their job, or told to apologies for their words, or investigated by the police, or worse still, arrested all because of what they said.

Freedom of speech in Britain is getting hammered like never before. Even the British National Party, who in the not-so-distant past boasted of being the staunchest defenders of free speech on Earth – couldn’t call the police quick enough to have Jo Brands joke about the BNP ‘investigated’.

Don’t get me wrong here, I have no intention whatsoever of endorsing racist language – nevertheless, what we appear to be witnessing is a new imposition of a snobbish etiquette. It is an etiquette that cannot be argued against, and has no interest in free and open debate. Similar to the police who surrounded and imprisoned some 3000 May Day protestors on Oxford Street back in 2001, the new snobby etiquette police are trying to reign in the limits of free speech. Today, it seems there are some words that cannot be used, even in private.

The most disturbing aspect of all this was pretty much summed up by Jay Hunt, a BBC controller who arrogantly argued on radio that it really didn’t matter that Carol Thatcher had used the word ‘gollywog’ at the BBC green room – even if Thatcher had used the word in her bedroom, Hunt added ‘I don’t think it’s fine that she [Thatcher] says this at home’. Here, the distinction between what is said in public and private has all but disappeared.

It’s at times like these that free speech needs to be defended more than ever. My belief in the right to free speech is unconditional. It means there is no such thing as full free speech for me, but partial free speech for Carol Thatcher, Prince Harry or Jo Brand. You cannot divide free speech – we either have it, or we don’t. Of course, this doesn’t mean we should go softly on the obvious rubbish espoused by Thatcher, Prince Harry, Brand, or even Tottenham supporters. I do not adhere to the notion that we should take their pathetic views seriously. Free speech isn’t about ‘them’, it’s about our ability to judge for ourselves.

Failing banks? Why not let them fail?

2009-02-12T01:12:00.005+01:00

The best joke I’ve heard recently is ‘what’s the difference between the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and bankers? Some people still have a bit of sympathy for the IRA’.

British capitalism is currently in a very sorry state, meanwhile, thousands of people in the UK, and Ireland are feeling the pain of this crisis.

The policy of bailing out financial institutions with state funds does not appear to be working - indeed, it seems to be making matters far worse. On the surface, it also looks as if we are witnessing the rise of ‘state capitalism’, with unprecedented levels of state intervention in the economy. There must be a better way to run the economic affairs of a nation? The Nobel prize economist, Joseph Stiglizt admitted to The Daily Telegraph that there was a solid argument for letting bad banks go to the wall - and why not? The billions we would save in ‘bailouts’ could be used, as Stiglizt argued, to rebuild the ‘skeletons of the old banks to build a healthier structure’.

Stiglizt is not alone in thinking that governments would be much better placed to deal with the problem of a failed bank - if only the authorities would declare these banks insolvent. The respected American economist James Galbraith, bemoans the fact that some $9.7 trillion of state funds is being thrown at banking institutions who's assets and 'securities contain, on the face of it, misrepresentation or fraud in the files'. Indeed, I agree with Galbraith's sentiments - why should the public hand over trillions of dollars, or billions of pounds, for assets, as Galbraith argues,'which nobody, no outside investor doing due diligence on behalf of a client for whom they have some responsibility, would touch'?

That money could be used instead in investments in the real economy - as opposed to propping up discredited and bankrupted banks and financial institutions. It's a real shame that the current debate on the economic crisis is being led by a political elite who are failing to take any responsibilities. The authorities new mantra seems to be 'we have no desire to takeover banks' - if that really is the case, why bother to bail them out when they go bust then?

Brazilian cinema - Tropa de Elite

2008-06-05T16:53:00.003+01:00

The most talked about Brazilian film since Fernando Meirelles’ Oscar nominated masterpiece City of Gods. The director of Tropa de Elite, Jose Padilha, has already scoped the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival with this extremely violent and moving work based on semi-fictional accounts of Rio de Janeiro’s strategic para-military police force back in 1997, just before the visit of the Pope to Brazil. The film is an in depth exploration of want it takes to become a member of BOPE, or Rio’s Special Police Operation Battalion. It is also an exposé of systemic corruption within Rio’s police forces.

Few people will remember the Brazilian police authorities flying into Britain back in 2005, to humiliate the Metropolitan police about the folly of ‘shoot-to-kill’ policies following the tragic accidental shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Even then, I thought ‘hello, who are the Brazilian Police to lecture the MET about the fallacy of shooting first and asking questions later’? If anything, Tropa de Elite is cinematic proof that the police forces in Rio are real experts in lethal violence - and arbitrary torture.

Tropa de Elite graphically depicts what many of us in the West had already thought about the Brazilian authorities attitude towards policing in the slums of Rio – they train, arm to the teeth, and unleash death squads into Rio’s poor and lawless favelas. The central character, Capitan Nascimento (Wagner Moura) who narrates throughout the film coldly explains how BOPE, the ‘men in black enter the favela to kill – never to die’. Capitan Nascimento is Rio’s Beowulf, he is the good-looking archetypal heroic militarist, however, he’s also a hideous monster, and he knows it – that is one reason why he must leave this elite police squad. Moura’s delivers an impressive performance as the tough but flawed Capitan, which is truly first-rate. Tropa de Elite is no ordinary cops and robbers’ film - it is to all intents and purposes a civil war film. It’s a must see movie especially for the fans of City of Gods, or anyone who has any real serious interest in all things Brazilian.

Climate change: who's afraid of geo-engineering?

2008-04-16T16:57:00.008+01:00

When it comes to the debate about possible solutions to climate change, environmentalists are forever banging on and on about the fact that it is they who are 'armed' with nothing but the latest peer reviewed science. As well as that, how many more times have I got to hear that climate change is the most pressing crisis facing the whole of mankind - now war, poverty and disease have been relegated to second place? What is worse is the fact that when a solution (other than micro-managing humanity back to the Dark-ages, or worse, the caves) is put forward as a possible solution, it is green activists who are normally the first to poo-poo such solutions - and normally, in just one sentence.

This does make you wonder if environmentalists really do want to bring this climate change 'crisis' under control? Indeed, if humanity were to come up with a viable, reliable and peer reviewed scientific tool that could halt climate change, green activists would be put right out of business, they would affectively have their green rug snatched from right underneath them. Such is the emerging challenge that environmentalists appear to be facing from scientists involved in 'geo-engineering' plans and solutions. It seems that the greens would rather see the planet, and humans burn than support geo-engineering solutions.

For all the green talk about tampering with nature, human hubris, or how one environmental organisation based in Canada put it 'Gambling with Gaia', geo-engineering may very well offer some serious global solutions to climate change. Of course, it almost goes without saying, don't take my word for it, even the inventor of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller thinks the same, Teller argued that geo-engineering actually 'appears to be a promising approach'.

Ultimately, it is not the potential that geo-engineering has to halt climate change that is sneered at by most environmentalist, as far as most greens are concerned, geo-engineering does not address the core problem of climate change - for the greens, the core problem relating to climate change is in the domain of morality. The truth is, environmentalists do not really want to halt climate change, what they appear to want to stop, and attack, are all forms of overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation. What the greens would really prefer is humanity to suffer first - and stop people believing in the idea that humans might one day conquer the threat of climate change. The greens dare not imagine such a thing as putting an end to climate change, that would just rob them of their raison d'etre - would it not?

Zimbabwe: a state the West loves to hate

2008-04-06T20:55:00.009+01:00

It has become highly fashionable in the Western media to draw far fetched parallels between the architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler, and Zimbabwe's current incumbent, Robert Mugabe. Of course, such comparisons are complete fantasise which says far more about those who use such terminology to describe Mugabe, than it does about the current situation on the ground in Zimbabwe.

In the rush to demonise Mugabe, many have forgotten that it was in fact the white supremacist and former Rhodesian leader Ian Smith who first coined the phrase 'Black Hitler' to describe Mugabe and his national liberation movement - and many in the West have also ignored how the Great Western powers, their governments and fiscal institutions have played the most important role in bringing the Zimbabwean economy to its knees. Indeed, it has been the outside interference in the internal affairs of Zimbabwe that have twisted and distorted the countries economy.

It is difficult to imagine how back in 2001, The New York Times gave Zimbabwe the title of the 'worst government on earth' - yeah, right, as if - what, worse than China? Such statements actually betray the narrow and highly selective nature of criticism directed against Zimbabwe by its opponents in the West. Some Western observers (former colonials) seem to lose all sense of proportion when talking about Zimbabwe, for one writer of the The Times (London), what appears to be unfolding in Zimbabwe is nothing less than a 'silent genocide'. Even the organisation Genocide Watch rightfully argue that such claims can appear 'ridiculous' given the fact that there have been relatively few deaths due to conflict in Zimbabwe.

Much of what I see and read about Zimbabwe is no more than unsubstantiated junk propaganda. As the astute political journalist Brendan O'Neill kindly reminds us, there are a few honourable exceptions, like the US congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who had the temerity to question received Western wisdom on Zimbabwe. McKinney rightfully argued that Zimbabwe is 'Africa's second-longest stable democracy', it is a country that has 'multi-party' elections, the opposition has 'over 50 seats in the parliament. It has an opposition press which vigorously criticises the government and governing party. It has an independent judiciary which issues decisions contrary to the wishes of the governing party'. That's more than can be said about Egypt, Rwanda, or the Congo. Yet all three of these countries are allies of the West who receive serious amounts of funding from the United States.

Zimbabwe, viewed from the perspective of Western colonial, 'Eton-educated' bi-focals appears more like a horrific symbol of African arrogance and cockiness. It is a point of view that cannot comprehend how 'our last white man in Rhodesia' Ian Smith was humiliated and forcefully jettisoned out of office, by a ‘Black Hitler’ to boot.

Artistic freedoms under attack in Britain

2008-02-15T01:01:00.013+01:00

Britain is not exactly a 'police state' as some on the left of politics would like to suggest - indeed, I would argue that such propositions say far more about the people who espouse it than it does about the state of freedom in contemporary Britain. However, when it comes to evaluating the extent of artistic freedom in Britain today, the charge of 'police state' is not entirely that wide of the mark.

Witness the treatment of Samina Malik at the hands of the British state - a second-rate Muslim poet (ok, I wouldn't like to massage Samina's ego), third-rate Muslim poet, who's only crime was to write terribly bad poems. Salmina, a 23 year old Londoner, aka the 'Lyrical Terrorist', wept openly when the jury at the Old Bailey found her guilty of 'possessing records likely to be used for terrorism', or in other words - her poems and a Mujahideen handbook.

It's true that Malik was a bit of an idiot with some far fetched nihilistic fantasies, but since when has it become a crime to be a wannabe nihilistic weirdy-beardy pin-up poster girl, with hateful thoughts and some seriously dodgy poems? To all intents and purposes, Malik was found guilty of harbouring some sick ideas, and some really bad poems. To lock someone up and waste the time of the Old Bailey just because we don't like someones poems is a far more dangerous trend than anything that Samina Malik could have thought of.

The attacks on artistic freedom in Britain goes much deeper than the case of Samina Malik and her 'dangerous' poems - over in petty authoritarian Brighton, the the powers that be are planning on banning any art exhibition, or revoking the licence of any music venue that exhibits or performs any work of art or piece of music that might provoke 'racist, homophobic or sectarian violence'. Failure to comply with the councils policy could lead to the closure of any art or music venue. Such draconian decrees are reminicent of the worst days of East Germany under Stalinist type dictators, it's the thin edge of a very ugly anti-freedom wedge.

In the name of protecting minorities, Brighton's licensing policy has become the cutting edge of the assault on artistic freedom. Brighton councils intentions may be good, but the consequences and long-term implications in interfering with the arts and artists are much more frightening. The council are effectively saying to artists that there are certain things you cannot express in your art, and if you want to exhibit or perform in Brighton you will need the councils nod of moral approval, or else.

I'm very much in agreement with the political journalist Brendan O’Neill, who rightfully argues that 'Brighton is doing so much more than simply messing about with its licensing laws: it is using its power to define what is socially responsible art, and to circumscribe the artistic imagination itself'. Indeed, some of the perverse consequences of the councils licensing laws are spreading further than Brighton's galleries, bars and clubs - now libraries, music shops and radio stations are coming under anti-freedom attacks.

The biggest lie we are constantly being told here is that there is apparently a very thin line between what artists say or think, and what other people might do as a consequence of being exposed to such thoughts or ideas. On the contrary, that line is very thick, and Brighton council, and the high courts of the Old Bailey have no right policing the publics taste of what is or what is not appropriate or acceptable art, music or poetry. I'll leave the last words to an artist and poet who really understood what freedom and art are all about, Victor Hugo, who argued that 'freedom in art, freedom in society this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive'.

Picture: Green Party Councillor Simon Williams displaying the music he wants outlawed in Brighton.

Environmentalism: bang goes thier nuclear arguments

2008-01-12T21:02:00.000+01:00

There may actually be a coherent and decent argument against building a new generation of nuclear power stations in Britain - but the British environmentalist movement have not come up with one single one so far. Indeed, environmental arguments against nuclear power are devised solely from myths and ill-founded jurassic prejudice against new technology, which they appear to fear for no good reason.

For example, one of the fiercest critics of the governments plan to build new nuclear power stations is Caroline Lucas MEP for the Green Party. As far as Dr Lucas is concerned securing Britain's future energy supply with state-of-the-art nuclear power stations is simply 'dangerous, irresponsible and costly distraction from the real challenge of tackling climate change' - but none of this is true.

Indeed, Western nuclear power facilities are the safest and the most economically viable form of electricity production known to mankind. Don't take my word for it - just take a good look at the French nuclear industry who have been producing safe and cheap electricity from the atom for well over 30 years. Far from being 'dangerous, irresponsible and costly', French nuclear electricity production has been an undeniable success story.

If anything, it is the likes of Dr Lucas that have been irresponsible, costly, and ultimately dangerous. Indeed, it is Dr Lucas who uses and abuses the politics of fear when she raises the spectra of international terrorism as a reason why Britain should not dabble with nuclear technology. It has been 30 years of such backward, environmentalist propaganda that has held back the development of nuclear technology in the UK. I think it is high time we put the greens anti-progressive and rubbish ideas where they belong, in the recycling dustbin of history.

Freedom: even for the thoughts we hate

2007-10-18T16:42:00.000+01:00

Before I start, I would like to make one thing very clear, I have no time, or sympathy whatsoever for racist scum like the British National Party and its supporters. Indeed, I would like to think of myself as a born free Englishman who has the right to say whatever I want, and as such, I must insist that under no circumstances should there be any restrictions on the rights of anyone to speak freely.

Unlike some left leaning political commentators in the blogsphere, who argue that they 'support free speech, but...' - my belief in the right to free speech is unconditional. That means there is no such thing as partial freedom of speech, or free speech for me, but not for them. As far as I'm concerned, free speech is not divisable - we either have it or we don't - and I say, we should have it all.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not arguing that we should go softly, softly on the obvious nonsense espoused by racists, Holocaust deniers, or West Ham supporters. I do not adhere to the notion that we should take their pathetic views seriously. On the contrary, my defense of free speech means that we should have the right to ridicule or hammer our opponents in open debate - indeed, this is the whole point. It now appears that the greatest threat to our right to free speech comes not from the misogynists of the BNP, or Holocaust deniers like the discredited historian David Irving, the fiercest critics of free speech come instead from those on the left.

The left appear to be having a hissy-fit over the Oxford Union debating society inviting the leader of the BNP and David Irving to their 'Free Speech Forum', but the debate about free speech is not about the BNP or Irving, it's about our freedom to judge for ourselves - it's about our liberty to be able to listen to a debate and all the arguments, whether they are dumb arguments or not, we need this liberty in order to judge for ourselves - it is this freedom that the left seem to fear the most.

The worst thing about this whole affair is that the BNP and its supporters can now occupy the high moral ground and claim it is they who are the real champions of free speech. So yes, seeing Nick Griffin and Irving standing on a public platform arguing that 'no one can take their freedom away' is enough to make me puke - but those on the left standing outside the Free Speech Forum with placards demanding bans are in mine eye, even more sickening.

Outstanding photography by Sion Touhig/Getty Images

Al Gore: belittling the Nobel 'Peace' Prize

2007-10-14T19:51:00.000+01:00

There was a time when the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to brave people and organisations who had put their own lives on the line in order to help the victims of conflicts, or it was the very peacemakers themselves who had won the award - but not anymore.

These days it appears that doom and gloom thinking is being awarded with no less than a Nobel award. Al Gore's powerful, precautionary and apocalyptic tale An Inconvenient Truth, has been put on par with the likes of the International Committee of the Red Cross (two times winner), Martin Luther King Jr, Amnesty International, Lech Walesa and even the Dalai Lama.

But how can it be, that a factually inaccurate, puffed-up PowerPoint display can be placed in the same league as someone who spent 27 years in prison and became the first democratically elected President of South Africa? Then again, the racist South African dictator F.W. de Klerk also received an award, so what can we make of these bizarre and grotesque choices of Nobel 'Peace' prizes?

It seems as if the Nobel Prize Committee's criteria is to hand out it's awards to people who in someway reflect the committee's very own dull and banal sentimentalism - and Al Gore is a perfect example of the Prize Committee's virtues. The Nobel Committee can no longer distinguish between those who want real peace in this world, and those who want to reduce the human carbon-footprint. That is why even an unelected, motley character like the U2 front man Bono was even rumoured to be given an award. The decision to award Gore has in fact belittled the real purpose of the prize in mine eye - in the future, I will be saving my round of applause to those who have the bravery and temerity to stick two fingers up (not in a victory sign) to the Nobel Prize Committee. Now, let's have a big round of applause for Le Duc Tho.

Teens: old enough to bear arms, but not smoke?

2007-10-01T10:07:00.000+01:00

It's hard to imagine what it's like to be 17 years old in Gordon Brown's petty authoritarian Britain - if you're 17 you can legally have sex, get married and start a family, you can even volunteer to join the army. At 17 you have the right to bear arms and be professionally drilled and trained in lethal fighting and killing techniques. Indeed, according to Matthew Happold, the author of Child Soldiers in International Law, under-18s 'were deployed during the first Gulf War, where nearly 500 British soldiers were aged under 18, and in Kosovo'. Yet, in Brown's Britain, these teenagers will not even be allowed to purchase a simple packet of cigarettes.

Oh, come on Courtney I here you say 'how on Earth can you oppose the raising of the minimum age to purchase cigarettes'? Don't you know that smoking is bad for your health and can kill you? Yes, I'm well aware of that, being a smoker myself, and I suspect like most other smokers, we don't smoke for the benefit of our health. And in any case, there is no law on Earth that can stop teenagers from smoking - none.

Don't take my word for it, professional health bodies from the Department of Health to the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh publicly admit that 'there is no evidence that raising the age of purchase on its own will influence tobacco sales to young people'. Indeed, even the World Bank agrees that in wealthy nations like Britain 'such restrictions have not been shown to be successful'.

This doesn't mean that I'm in favour of more teenagers smoking, of course not - but the facts are, if teenagers want to smoke, they will, and there is nothing that New Labour, or anyone in the world can do to stop them - so why the new 'crackdown'? It appears that the British government have completely run out of ideas about how we should go about building the Good Society - instead, what we have is a Supernanny state that is addicted to anti-smoking - I think it's high time we stubbed them out.

neo-Jacobin special: against the Guardian

2007-09-18T18:08:00.001+01:00

A neo-Jacobin special essay - 50,000 editions of the imperialist, warmongering, hate-filled Guardian newspaper

By Murray Mcdonald

There have been 50 000 issues of what was then called the Manchester Guardian published since John Taylor founded it in 1821. Commemorating that anniversary current editor Alan Rusbridger has been talking about the paper’s radical record, since it first championed the victims of the Peterloo Massacre.

What the Guardian forgot to say was that Taylor launched his paper to undermine the working class leaders of the reform movement; or that Taylor refused to use either word ‘Peterloo’ or ‘Massacre’, thinking them too inflammatory (see 1. The Guardian and the Peterloo Massacre, below).

In fact the Guardian has never been all that radical a newspaper anyway, generally steering a middle course between popular opposition and establishment reaction. Recently critical of Tony Blair’s administration, the paper was his first and greatest cheer-leader (see 2. The Guardian and Radical Opinion, below).

Over the years, much of the newspaper’s venom has been reserved for opposition movements. The Guardian had a particular contempt for anti-imperialist movement, pouring scorn on Third World nationalists like Lumumba and Nasser, advocating military intervention across the globe (see 3. The Guardian and imperialism, below).

In particular, the Guardian was violently opposed to Ireland’s freedom fighters, supporting the occupation by British troops in 1969, internment without trial, and blaming the Civil Rights movement for the deaths on Bloody Sunday (see 4. The Guardian and the Fenians, below).

When Women Suffragettes fought for the vote, Guardian editor C.P. Scott denounced them as fanatics, just as the Manchester Guardian opposed giving the working classes the vote before (See 5. The Guardian and the Vote, below).

And when Abraham Lincoln fought a Civil War against slavery, the Manchester Guardian rallied to defend the southern Slave-Owners (See 6. The Guardian and the American Civil War, below).

Though it has become, in the words of one regular columnist, the newspaper of the New Establishment, the Guardian has always been the paper of the Middle Class (see 7. A Middle Class Newspaper, below).

The Guardian has been deeply hostile to the working class, especially when they have taken matters into their own hands (See 8. The Guardian and the Working Class, below)

That is all ancient history now, but it is interesting to reflect how in more recent times the Guardian succeeded in becoming the agenda-setting paper it is today. Its radical reputation today stems largely from the collapse of political opposition in the 1990s. As the political parties moved closer to the centre ground, the Guardian had grand ideas of becoming itself the focus of a new opposition. Above all, it was the campaign for military intervention in the former Yugoslavia that found the Guardian setting the political agenda. Reporting the civil war there, the Guardian honed the arguments for ‘humanitarian intervention’: demonising the enemy, talking up the humanitarian crisis, and pushing for military action. (see 9. The Guardian’s war against the Serbs, below).

Though it has balked at this government’s attacks on civil liberties, the Guardian pioneered New Labour’s caring authoritarianism. It was the Guardian that first made the case for greater government control of our private lives and opinions (see 10. The Guardian and Civil Liberties, below).

Of course, trawling through the archives to uncover reactionary editorials does not tells us much more than finding admirable ones does - but it does tell us that the Guardian’s radical record is a myth. Looking at the historical record only really reminds you that in the past, people had very different ideas from us, and that the
Manchester Guardian reflected the prejudices of its middle class readership.

After all, a newspaper’s editorial line is a lot less interesting than the quality of its reporting - of which the paper is rightly proud. It is only in our current, and odd political hiatus that the newspapers’ role as opposition could be given any credit - or that readers would put up with so many sanctimonious comment pieces.

Under the editorship of Alan Rusbridger, though, the Guardian has indeed become an influential voice, doing more than sum up the middle class prejudices of our times. It has become the self-appointed guardian of our morals. But looking at the paper’s record, it is hard to see why.

1. The Guardian and Peterloo

Celebrating the 50 000th edition of the Guardian, today’s editor Alan Rusbridger linked the paper to the outrage over the Peterloo Massacre of reformers at St. Peter’s Fields in 1819, which the first editor, John Taylor ‘helped to make a national scandal’. In fact, the Manchester Guardian was founded to defeat the radical reform movement in words, as the Cavalry had in deeds.

Eleven people were killed and 500 injured when mounted police charged the reform meeting in Manchester and John Taylor did cover the hearings in the new Manchester Guardian. But Taylor was no supporter of the reform movement.

Of the reform leaders Taylor wrote scathingly in the Manchester Gazette

‘they have appealed not to the reason but the passions and the suffering of their abused and credulous fellow-countrymen, from whose ill-requited industry they extort for themselves the means of a plentiful and comfortable existence. “The do not toil, nether do they spin,” but they live better than those that do.’ (Manchester Gazette, 7 August 1819, in Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971, p.20)

Pointedly, Taylor never used the inflammatory word ‘Peterloo’, except in a footnote, and even then in quotation marks; and he refused to use the word ‘massacre’, preferring the more neutral ‘tragedy’ (Ayerst, p.19). The dramatic catchword Peterloo was coined by The Manchester Observer described by a Home Office report as ‘the organ of the lower classes’ designed to ‘inflame their minds’.

The Manchester Observer was closed by the crippling cost of police prosecutions (Stanley Harrison, Poor Men’s Guardians, 1974, p.53). Two months later a group of Manchester textile merchants grabbed the opportunity to take the political initiative out of the streets. Eleven subscribed £100 each (around £6,800 in today’s money) to start Taylor’s paper.

In its prospectus, the Manchester Guardian promised to promote the ‘just principles of Political Economy’. The intended readership was ‘amongst the classes to whom, more especially, Advertisements are generally addressed’. Such people would value ‘the commercial connections and knowledge of the conductors of the Guardian’ (Ayerst, p. 23-4).

The Manchester Guardian paid the stamp duty, putting it, at seven pence an issue, beyond the pockets of working people. Real radicals challenged the stamp duty, publishing papers that flouted the law, like Henry Hetherington’s, launched in 1830 and pointedly titled The Poor Man’s Guardian. The Manchester Guardian attacked rival papers that evaded the stamp duty.

The working class Manchester and Salford Advertiser dubbed the Guardian ‘the foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill-owners’ (21 May 1836).

2. The Guardian and Radical Opinion

‘His strongest claim is that he has systematically rethought the basis of Labour’s appeal and project in the light of modern imperatives and realities... In short: we think Tony Blair should be elected as Labour’s new leader.’ (The Choice for the Future, Guardian leader, 2 July 1994)

Today’s Guardian has been critical of Tony Blair’s shaky premiership. But it is easy to forget that the Guardian was the original ‘New Labour’ paper. Its success mirrored the growing appeal of Tony Blair’s Labour Party from 1994 onwards. When he won the election the Guardian editorialised ‘the moment when Britain at last gave itself the chance to construct a modern liberal socialist order and, by so doing, caught the mood of the troubled western world’ (2 May 1997).

Throughout much of the first Blair term, the Guardian was his greatest cheer-leader, over the Kosovo War, the Human Rights legislation and anti-harassment laws. According to one account, editorial meetings did not start until Number Ten Press Officer Alastair Campbell rung to tell Rusbridger what was going to be in the paper.

But then the Guardian always was a lot less radical than its critics thought. In 1982, a right-wing faction broke away from the Labour Party, the SDP (Social Democratic Party), protesting its drift to the left. The SDP was Blairism before its time. Three of the Guardian’s four leader writers joined the SDP, as did columnist Polly Toynbee, journalist Mary Stott, senior political columnist Peter Jenkin and labour editor John Torode. Most of them stood as candidates (and lost) in the 1983 election, or served on the SDP’s national committee. For a while the paper was divided between SDP supporters and a few token ‘public school trots’ (Guardian, 25 January 2006).

Of course, many on the paper had been influenced by the radicalism of the 1960s. But as battle lines hardened, most Guardian writers recoiled from ‘picket- line violence’ and northern Ireland’s freedom fighters. Increasingly, the paper’s radical credentials were earned with strident articles about far-away places like Chile, or South Africa - while cautious realism decided editorial policy on domestic issues.

In the 1950s the paper so loathed Labour’s left wing champion Aneurin Bevan ‘and the hate-gospellers of his entourage’ that it called for Attlee’s post-war Labour government to be voted out of office (Manchester Guardian, leader, 22 October 1951). When the left wanted a second front against Hitler in the Second World War, the Manchester Guardian opposed it on Churchill’s advice (he hoped Hitler would save him the trouble of defeating the Russians, David Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971, 549).

The Chartists, the Suffragettes, the Irish Republicans, Abraham Lincoln and the General Strikers were all attacked in the pages of the Manchester Guardian. As much as it has made a reputation for criticising the powers-that-be, it has always been more afraid of popular opposition.

3. The Guardian and imperialism

Reading the Guardian today, one might get the impression that the paper is anti-war. But that is not true. When the bombing started in the first of America’s wars against Iraq in 1991, the Guardian adopted the tone of Winston Churchill:

The simple cause, at the end, is just. An evil regime in Iraq instituted an evil and brutal invasion. Our soldiers and airmen are there, at UN behest, to set that evil right. Their duties are clear ... let the momentum and the resolution be swift. (leader 17 January 1991).

In the lead-up to the war, the Guardian reported stories of grotesque Iraqi atrocities, atrocities that Matthew Engel agreed ‘in other circumstances would seem absurd, but here seemed all-too believable’ (1991). In fact they were just absurd, manufactured by the military. After the event, journalist Maggie O’Kane conceded ‘this is a tale of how to tell lies and win wars, and how we, the media, were harnessed like beach donkeys and led through the sand to see what the British and US military wanted us to see in this nice clean war.’ (Guardian 16 December 1995)

The first Gulf War was lauded as a re-birth of Great Power solidarity at the UN Security Council. Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait ‘has done more than anything else to reawaken the sleeping giant and galvanise the Security Council into action’ wrote Hella Pick. Pick deplored the fact that the Soviet Union had been allowed to veto the Great Powers’ military actions, giving too much power to nationalists in the Third World:

The liberal use of the veto, especially by the Soviet Union, has made a mockery of the council’s main task of maintaining peace and security. Its impotence opened the way for the Third World majority in the General Assembly to dominate the UN, exploiting the East-West divisions and imposing their own agenda on the world body. (The Gulf Crisis - the first Sixty Days, Guardian Collection, October 1990, p 57)

Hostility to Third World nationalism has been an enduring theme at the Guardian over the years. In 1973 they accused Middle Eastern countries of ‘using the Arab Oil weapon’ (Putting the West over a Barrel, 15 October). When Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956 the Guardian was outraged. ‘It was a heavy day for the world when the canal that has for so long been an international interest passed under a violently nationalist government’ (Leader, 28 July 1956, probably written by David Mitrany).

‘The government is right to be prepared for military action at Suez’, because Egyptian control of the canal would be ‘commercially damaging for the West and perhaps part of a plan for creating a new Arab Empire based on the Nile (Leader, 2 August 1956). Helpfully, the editor suggested that there might ‘be a way of reconciling Egypt’s interests with the rest of the World by creating a new international authority for supervising the canal without ownership. It could collect revenues on behalf of the Egyptian government’ (Guardian, 31 July 1956).

The Guardian’s hostility to Third World nationalists could be crass. In 1961 the popular Congolese president was taken prisoner by United Nations troops who handed him over to his enemies. ‘Lumumba is not blameless for the problems in the Congo’ lectured the Guardian even as his corpse was being mutilated (Leader, 19 January 1961). More importantly, they lectured those ‘shouting slogans in Leopoldville’ that ‘Criticism of the United Nations Operation in the Congo and of the men in charge of it has nearly all stemmed from ignorance of the facts’ (Guardian Leader, 23 Jan. 1961). But it was the United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold who conspired to foment ethnic rivalries in the Congo leading to Lumumba’s assassination (Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba, Verso, 2001).

The Guardian did support moderate nationalist regimes, and found it difficult to argue with the formation of the non-Aligned movement in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. Still, anti-western rhetoric there was deplored, as were any ‘pious hopes’ (Leader, 26 April 1955). The suspicion remained that this was ‘a phoney non-aggression, designed to lull the countries of Asia until they can be organised as parts of a Communist empire’ (Leader, 18 April 1955).

In fairness, Manchester Guardian did have important reservations about the growing appeal of popular imperialism in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. It was a Guardian journalist who exposed the rifling of the Mahdi’s tomb by British troops in Omdurman, who stole his head (Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971, p 267). When British troops starved the families of the Boers in the world’s first concentration camps, in 1900, it was Emily Hobhouse who exposed the atrocity in the Manchester Guardian (Ibid., 285).

The reason that the Guardian was so out of step with Empire jingoism was only partly out of sympathy for its victims. Like many middle class liberals of the time it was the popularity of jingoism that really offended. One story that has entered the paper’s legends is that pro-war protestors surrounded the Manchester Guardian’s offices in 1900, while a brass band paid for by the Manchester Courier marched around it playing The Dead March in ‘Saul’ (Ayerst, 280). The Relief of Mafeking gave rise to a number of stories of ‘Mafficking’ mobs, many of them turning out to be apocryphal, but all sharing the common thread that common people get to insult their liberally-minded betters under the cloak of patriotism. Empire was a cause that won working class people to the Tories and away from the Liberal Party, feared the Guardian.

Much as it has decried popular nationalism in the Third World, the Guardian is uncomfortable with it in the first. It is better that military intervention is done in the name of the ‘international community’, so there is no danger of unpleasant Jingoism. The failure of the Coalition of the Willing to secure an international mandate made it difficult for the Guardian to endorse the Iraq war in 2003. But even if they had doubts about a military mandate, they still shared the prejudice that the problem in the Middle East was Saddam and his ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’:

‘It is not credible to argue, as Iraq did in its initial reaction to Mr Powell [at the Security Council], that it is simply all lies. ...Iraq must disarm.’ (Guardian Leader, Thursday February 6, 2003)

Of course, we now know that it was all lies, and Iraq could not give up weapons it did not have. When the war looked like a success, Guardian veteran Hugo Young wrote about Tony Blair’s gamble:

For a political leader, few therapies compare with military victory. For a leader who went to war in the absence of a single political ally who believed in the war as unreservedly as he did, Iraq now looks like a vindication on an astounding scale. (13 April 2003)

If the Guardian today is less appreciative of Britain’s role in Iraq, that has less to do with principled opposition, and more with the failure of the project.

4. The Guardian and the Fenians

If they had got to the obituary page, younger Guardian readers might have been surprised to learn that journalist John O’Callaghan resigned from the paper in 1972 in protest at its editorial support for repression in northern Ireland. ‘The Guardian leaders made excuses for internment,’ he wrote, and damningly:

‘If a couple of British papers and a broadcasting channel had shared the Sunday Times’s occasional scepticism about the performance of the British army in Northern Ireland, the slaughter in Derry on Bloody Sunday might have been averted.’ (21 April 2007)

Thirteen civil rights demonstrators were shot dead by the British Army on the day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972, in northern Ireland. But the Guardian thought it was the Civil Rights activists who were to blame:

‘The organisers of the demonstration, miss Bernadette Devlin among them, deliberately challenged the ban on marches. They knew that stone throwing and sniping could not be prevented, and that the IRA might use the crowd as a shield.’ (Guardian, 1 February 1972)

Lord Widgery’s 1972 enquiry was widely seen as a whitewash - but not by the Guardian. ‘Lord Widgery’s report is not one-sided’, it led. Indeed they questioned Widgery’s view that trouble could have been avoided if the army had kept a low-key attitude: ‘To ask anyone to keep a low-key attitude if persistently stoned is to ask superhuman behaviour.’ (20 April 1972) The demonstrators had been protesting against the introduction of the internment of political prisoners without trial. The Guardian did not support their cause.

‘Internment without trial is hateful, repressive and undemocratic. In the existing Irish situation, most regrettably, it is also inevitable. ... To remove the ringleaders, in the hope that the atmosphere might calm down, is a step to which there is no obvious alternative.’ (Guardian leader, 10 Aug. 1971)

Indeed, the Guardian supported the initial decision to send British troops to northern Ireland, after Derry rioters succeeded in fighting of Ulster’s paramilitary police for days.

British soldiers could ‘present a more disinterested face of law and order’ (Guardian leader, 15 Aug. 1969), but only on condition that ‘Britain takes charge’ (Guardian leader, 4 Aug. 1969). The Guardian even offered some useful advice, in case the soldiers did not know how to put down the protestors: ‘a curfew in the troubled areas seems essential’ to ‘separate those determined to make trouble from those who are drawn in unwillingly’ (leader, 16 Aug. 1969).

In fact the Guardian always had a knee-jerk reaction against rebellion in Ireland. The paper rubbished the Fenians, patriots who fought to free their country from British rule in the nineteenth century as ‘silly and infatuated traitors in Ireland’ (Manchester Guardian 21 October 1848). It called for the introduction of Martial Law - ‘better than the midnight legislation of Tipperary’. Its editorials were so rabid that the Irish of Manchester organised a demonstration outside its offices (David Ayerst, The Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper, 1971, p 111)

When James Connolly and Padraig Pearse, heroes of Ireland’s Easter Rising in 1916 were executed, editor C.P. Scott wrote: ‘it is a fate which they invoked and of which they would probably not complain’ (4 May, 1916, quoted in Ayerst, The Manchester Guardian, 1971, p.392)

The paper did support the more acceptable, constitutional nationalism of the Home Rule movement in the 1880s. Similarly the Guardian’s current, Republican-sympathising line was only adopted after Sinn Fein leaders broached an end to the armed struggle.

5. The Guardian and Suffrage

The Guardian’s attitude to democracy has always been conditional. Certainly readers of today’s Guardian Women would be surprised to read editor C.P. Scott blaming the Suffragettes for sabotaging David Lloyd George’s efforts to win women the vote:

‘Yet this is the moment chosen by every great suffrage society to employ every engine of misguided fanaticism in order to wreck, if it be in their power, the fair prospects of their own cause.’ (Manchester Guardian leader, 18 November 1911)

Scott’s anger rose because he had tried to broker a compromise with Lloyd George to get some women the vote - though history records that the Prime Minister was not prepared to compromise until after the Great War (see Diane Atkinson, Votes for Women, Cambridge University Press, 1988). Still Scott clung to the belief that Lloyd George would have given women the vote already, if they had not taken direct action.

Emily Wilding Davison - who afterwards died in a protest trying to stop the King’s Horse in the Derby - wrote to the Guardian defending direct action. In his reply, Scott turned the truth on its head to make Lloyd George the champion of suffrage, and the Suffragettes its enemy:

‘The really ludicrous position is that Mr Lloyd George is fighting to enfranchise seven million women and the militants are smashing unoffending people’s windows and breaking up benevolent societies meetings in a desperate effort to prevent him.’

Scott thought the Suffragettes’ ‘courage and devotion’ was ‘worthy of a better cause and saner leadership’, and ‘to compare that with any great popular uprising of the past is too absurd a plea to require refutation’ (quoted in Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971, p 353).

But in fact the Guardian had usually opposed popular uprisings of the past, right back to its beginnings campaigning against the reformers of St. Peter’s Fields (See 1. The Guardian and Peterloo, above) preferring moderate reform. It was not just the campaign for votes for women the Manchester Guardian opposed. It opposed votes for working class men, too, attacking Chartists, Socialists and reformers alike.

In 1848 the Guardian explained the shortcomings of Louis Blanc’s provisional government in France:

‘If the obvious intentions of the government were fully accomplished, the influence of property would be destroyed ... a change of relative positions to which men of property will not submit’. (Manchester Guardian, 22 March 1848)

In November of 1830 the Guardian anticipated the coming reform act. The qualification for a vote ought to be low enough, wrote editor John Taylor:

‘to put it fairly within the power of members of the labouring classes by careful, steady and persevering industry to possess themselves of it, yet not so low as to give anything like a preponderating influence to the mere populace ... the right of representation is not an inherent or abstract right, but the mere creation of an advanced condition of society. Its single object is to promote good government.’ (Manchester Guardian 4 December 1830)

The Manchester Guardian’s 1831 New Year’s message to readers warned: ‘hurried and extreme changes’ are ‘dangerous to the maintenance of public order’; ‘at present there is a degree of excitement’ which ‘has evidently a revolutionary tendency’ but it is impossible that these changes ‘should ever be carried into effect without a civil war.’ (Manchester Guardian 1 January 1831)

6. The Guardian and the American Civil War

When in 1861 the southern Confederacy rebelled against the Union to avoid the abolition of slavery the cotton manufacturers liberalism was exposed as a sham. Their dependency on slave-picked cotton tempted them to support the South. The Manchester Guardian was no exception. They were embarrassed enough to disguise their support for slavery as an endorsement of the Confederacy’s right to self-determination.

Still the Manchester Guardian repeated Confederate propaganda against the liberator Abraham Lincoln, writing that ‘it was an evil day both for America and the world when he was chosen President of the United States’ (10 October 1862). Even on the news that Lincoln had been assassinated, the Manchester Guardian said ‘of his rule, we can never speak except as a series of acts abhorrent to every true notion of constitutional right and human liberty’ (27 April 1865). Among Lincoln’s acts so abhorrent to the Guardian was the Proclamation of Emancipation, 1 January 1863.

By contrast, the Manchester cotton workers set aside their immediate interest in cheap cotton to champion the wide cause of human liberty. In 1862 they filled the Free Trade Hall to support a resolution to that effect (penned by Karl Marx). The Manchester Guardian complained that ‘the chief occupation, if not the chief object of the meeting, seems to have been to abuse the Manchester Guardian’ (quoted in Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971, p155). In fact, the cotton operatives had nobler ambitions, it was just that they knew who their enemy was.

7. A middle class newspaper

‘I write for the Guardian,’ says Sir Max Hastings, ‘because it is read by the new establishment.’ (New Statesman 21 Feb. 2005)

Sir Max’s estimation is right. Under Alan Rusbridger’s editorship the Guardian has become the most important voice of the New Labour establishment. In fact it helped to create New Labour (see 2. The Guardian and radical opinion).

But Rusbridger remembers that long night of Conservative rule, from 1979 to 1997, when ‘Guardianistas’ were ‘taunted for their beards and sandals’ (Guardian, 9 June 2007). Then, under Peter Preston’s editorship, the middle classes deserted radicalism to vote for Margaret Thatcher, leaving the Guardian in the doldrums and on the defensive.

Still, the Guardian has never been a Tory paper, always getting its critical stance from the middle classes who were squeezed between the working class mob on one side and the establishment on the other. Founded by textile traders and merchants the Guardian had a reputation as ‘an organ of the middle class’ (Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Progress, 1973, p 109), or in the words of C.P. Scott’s son Ted ‘a paper that will remain bourgeois to the last’ (Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971, p.471).

Today the Guardian Media Group is proud of its ‘unique’ ownership structure, the Scott Trust, securing the Guardian’s editorial independence in perpetuity But the Scott Trust was originally created to secure the dynastic succession and protect the family investment from death duties (Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971). Even today the implied meaning of the Scott Trust is that it is still a family business in an era of corporate raiders. In fact the paper behaves like any other capitalist business, and a fairly successful one at that.

8. The Guardian and the Working Class

Nowadays working class militancy is an exception, or even just a memory. The Guardian often reminisces about such lost causes, though when those causes stood a chance of winning, the paper recoiled in horror. In the 1970s the paper blamed militant trade unionists, not bosses, for the problems of the low paid. Labour moderate Reg Prentice was quoted approvingly to the effect that socialist planning ‘demands of us a measure of sacrifice of our immediate gains sometimes for the greater good’ (Guardian leader, 2 Oct. 1973).

As so often, it was direct action by ordinary people that upset the hacks at Grays Inn Road in the seventies. When the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders occupied their yards the Guardian warned ‘this experiment in workers control will have to be abandoned quickly’ (Guardian leader, 2 Aug. 1971).

Back in 1926 C.P. Scott was instrumental in brokering the deal that wrecked the General Strike, getting the Trade Union General Council to sell out the miners for the vague hope of a better deal from Parliament (David Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971, p465). An editorial explained the Guardian’s hopes for an end to general strikes:

‘Will not the general strike cease to be counted henceforth as a possible or legitimate weapon of industrial warfare? May not the very idea of treating industry as a theatre of warfare come to be regarded as barbaric?’ (Manchester Guardian, 14 May 1926)

The Guardian deplored the way ‘some people like the excitement of it all; they see themselves in command, giving rapid decisions that determine the destiny of nations, making history’ (Leader 4 May 1926). Such a challenge to established authority was unacceptable, and ‘the Government must use all its powers to maintain the major public services ... the army and navy are available’ (Leader, 6 May 1926). As an employer himself, Scott identified with the established order and was particularly
offended that newspapers were granted no special exemption by the strikers (Ayerst, p 486). As to Scott’s promises that Parliament might do better by the miners than the General Strike: ‘The general strike has been called off, but the aim for which it was declared in unaccomplished’ (Manchester Guardian, quoted in Ayerst, p 467).

The Guardian did support moderate trade unionism, especially in the late nineteenth century, when hopes that organised labour could be rallied to support the Liberal Party were high. Like many middle class radicals (see Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The Impact of the Dock Strike’, Outcast London, 1971) the paper welcomed the 1889 Dock Strike because they preferred the working class under respectable leadership to a mob. Defending strikers against the charge of ‘socialistic agitation’ the Guardian thought ‘the cohesion of the men’ was ‘a triumph for the spirit of trade combination which is a very different thing’ (2 Sept. 1889) and preferable to the dock owners’ casual employment contracts: ‘by their present system the dock companies get an inferior class of labour’ (Manchester Guardian, 27 Aug. 1889).

As cotton merchants, the Guardian’s original backers were generally hostile to labour’s claims. Of the 1832 Ten Hours Bill the Guardian doubted whether in view of the foreign competition ‘the framing of a law positively enacting a gradual destruction of the cotton manufacture would be a much less rational procedure’ (28 Jan. 1832). The nineteenth century Guardian dismissed strikes as the work of outside agitators - ‘if an accommodation can be effected the occupation of the agents of the Union is gone. They live on strife.’ (26 Feb. 1873). Wigan Miners on 35 pence a day

‘would be richer men if they earned less money; and considering what is the degree of culture and what are the approved pleasures of their class, we doubt greatly whether higher wages would be any benefit to them’. (Manchester Guardian 10 April 1873)

It seems as if the wheel of history has turned full circle. As organised labour lost its power, the Guardian shed its industrial correspondents. Today its coverage of the working class is oddly reminiscent of its coverage back in the nineteenth century: the masses are a problem because of their excessive consumerism, and the threat the represent to social order.

9. The Guardian’s war against the Serbs

Before the US and Britain waged war on Iraq in 2003, the Guardian had supported military intervention against the Serbs in Kosovo in 1999. Trying to disguise the fact that the United Nations’ Security Council did not support the attack, the Guardian insisted that ‘The only honorable course for Europe and America is to use military force’ (Guardian, Leader, 23 March 1999). Or more bluntly, Mary Kaldor headlined her piece ‘Bombs away!’ (Guardian, 25 March 1999).

Hugo Young warned ‘armchair critics of Nato’s strategy in Kosovo’ what was at stake: ‘the defeat of Nato by Yugoslavia is a prospect that cannot be contemplated’ (Guardian, 27 April 1999). The moral certainty about Nato was mirrored by a similarly low opinion of the country they were fighting over: ‘a god-forsaken, dirt-poor, hate-ridden blot on the map of Europe’, according to Polly Toynbee (Guardian,18 April 1999).

Plainly, the Guardian’s visceral hatred of the Serbs has a history. It dates back to the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s. The Guardian took sides with the ‘defiant people of Dubrovnik’ (28 Oct. 1991) against ‘Mr Milosevic’s turbulent hordes’ (5 November) in Yugoslavia’s 1991 civil war. They asked Tory historian Norman Stone to explain that Western civilisation was at stake, because Dubrovnik

‘was a funnel for the European enlightenment to enter the Balkans. Now the Balkans, in a semi-savage sense, are getting there own back, wrecking the city and setting back the level of their own civilisation by 50 or 60 years.’ (13 Nov. 1991)

The Guardian editor felt it necessary to explain to Serbs that ‘Blowing limbs and heads off people is wrong’. ‘So is beating up and terrorising civilians.’ (21 Nov. 1991) Unless, that is, the terrorised civilians are themselves Serbs: The Croatian Army’s invasion of the Serb-enclave Krajina, in which 200 000 were made homeless, thought the Guardian, should be ‘welcomed as a hold on Serbian aggression’ (5 August 1995).

When fighting broke out in Sarajevo, the Serbs were ‘bestial’ (Guardian, 8 June 1992). In a leader headed ‘The need to fight to make the peace’, the Guardian explained that the UN Security Council will ‘have to confront the need for force’ (25 June 1992).

Of course, force was just the beginning. We need an ‘open-ended occupation’ (Woolacott, Guardian, 14 September 1996) or a ‘benign colonial regime’ (Borger, Guardian, 7 September 1996).

When Bosnia’s rival ethnicities were made to submit to rule under a United Nations’ Protectorate, the Guardian did not welcome a return to democracy. ‘The West’s mistake was to set too much store by holding the elections in Bosnia long before the conditions were ripe... The West allowed Bosnia’s politicians too much power over the last three years’ (Guardian, 1998, quoted in Chandler, Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton, p. 164).

When war returned to the region in 1999, the Guardian published Daniel Goldhagen’s view that the Serbs are ‘legally and morally incompetent to conduct their own affairs’ (‘Why Nato must take Belgrade’, G2, April 29 1999)

The Guardian’s anti-Serb crusade is so engrained now that it has become a self-contained universe of belief that could never really be dislodged. It is not unique to the Guardian - the cause was actively adopted by quite a swathe of the liberal intelligentsia, and its prejudices have filtered into the mainstream.

The Yugoslav war was important for the Guardian because it was a cause that saw the paper step out of mere reporting to lead radical opinion in a way that seemed actually to shape government policy. It also helped to outmanouever the more cautious militarists of John Major’s Conservative government. Maggie O’Kane demanded that Number 10 Press Officer Alastair ‘Campbell should acknowledge that it was the press reporting of the Bosnian war and the Kosovar refugee crisis that gave his boss the public support and sympathy he needed to fight the good fight against Milosevic.’ (Z Magazine, August 1999)

The Guardian’s campaign against the Serbs was, indeed, the original blueprint for ‘humanitarian intervention’, the policy adopted by Tony Blair when he came to power. All of its basic tenets - action on behalf of victims rather than for national interests; the demonisation of the enemy; war crimes tribunals - were set in play in the war against Iraq in 2003.

10. The Guardian and Civil Liberties

In a G2 article about the rise in petty regulations and intrusive warning signs, Stuart Jeffries sets out the problem well: ‘the presumption from our sign tsars is that Britons must have every last thing spelled out because we are uncivilised scum raised by wolves’. But it is an insight he cannot sustain, giving up the argument moments later on the grounds that ‘there is good and bad bossiness’: ‘In our anti-social, post-Thatcherite Britain, in which many people do selfish things in public without expecting to be told to stop, bossiness can be a good thing’. (19 June 2007).

Jeffries’ confusion typifies the difficulty that the Guardian has standing up for civil liberties. They worry about ‘bad bossiness’, like ex-Home Secretary John Reid’s Control Orders on terrorist suspects, because it is political repression. But they want to keep the ‘good bossiness’, like bans on hate speech and on harassment, and intrusive advice on health and diet. What the Guardian has never understood it that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bossiness alike both come from the same low opinion of ordinary people: ‘Uncivilised scum raised by wolves’, or in other words ‘anti-social, post Thatcherite selfish people’. Whichever way you say it, it means that the people are not to be trusted, and the state must take charge.

Quoting Labour’s Douglas Jay - approvingly - the Guardian concluded: ‘the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for the people than the people themselves’ (Leader, 3 July 2007).

Guardian columnists, like David Aaronovitch always objected to the catch phrase ‘political correctness’. They only heard right-wing columnists like Richard Littlejohn making excuses for racism. It never occurred to Aaronovitch that there might be something wrong with empowering college authorities or employers to decide what was and was not acceptable personal interaction.

‘What’s so terrible about the nanny state, anyway?’ asked Anna Coote, surely everyone believes in public health (Guardian, 26 May 2004). When it became clear that the Department of Health had wildly exaggerated the dangers of AIDS among heterosexuals in its campaign to scare young people off sex, Mark Lawson had no problem with that: ‘The government has lied and I am glad’ (Guardian, 24 June 1996). A nervous distrust of what their fellow men and women were doing, or just thinking about doing, was matched by naivety about the authorities. ‘Should we get upset if the police ask us for identity cards’, asked David Walker, only to answer: ‘No’ (Guardian 19 October 2001).

More recently, the Guardian has begun to have doubts about the Home Office’s attacks on civil liberties, represented by the draconian Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, The Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, or the anti- terrorist Control Orders. But the difficulty that the Guardian has tacking the government over civil liberties is that it shares all of New Labour’s underlying prejudices about the need to constrain ordinary people. Indeed, the Guardian helped to draft New Labour’s original assault on Civil Liberties, back in the 1990s.

In 1993, after the murder of a toddler Jamie Bulger by two older boys, Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair defined his policy of attacking civil liberties. He would be ‘tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime’. According to the Guardian, Blair ‘rightly berated the left for putting too much emphasis for the cause of crime on social conditions, and too little on individual responsibility’ (22 February 1993). In the mid-nineties, when New Labour was just formulating its new authoritarian agenda, the Guardian shared many of the same fears of social breakdown.

Then Melanie Phillips was the Guardian’s chief commentator on social affairs. She specialised in blood- curdling tales of the collapse of community. The Jamie Bulger case, she conceded was wholly exceptional, but still it was ‘a death of our times’ (Guardian, 22 January 1993). Developing the rhetorical devices that would make
Guardian readers wince when Home Secretary David Blunkett adopted them years later Phillips explained

‘Only the ivory-tower middle classes with a bad case of Utopian myopia could delude themselves that juvenile crime isn’t an immensely serious problem... Reality suggests that juvenile offending is up, not down. Community anxiety is understandable. The term ‘“moral panic’“ is misplaced.’ (Bring Back the Voice of Authority, Guardian 5 March 1993)

Nor was Phillips anticipation of New Labour’s ‘social breakdown’ agenda exceptional. In the Guardian’s sister paper, the Observer, David Rose lauded Jack Straw’s ‘holistic and often imaginative’ approach on youth crime, his commitment to ‘restorative justice’, to ‘rehabilitation not purely vengeful justice’ (4 May 1997).

When the government legislation on Anti-Social Behaviour Orders went through, the Guardian supported it. Arguing that similar legislation had led to a fall in crime in the US, Neil Addison wrote in the Guardian’s Law section: ‘Let’s hope anti-social behaviour orders will do the same for our own hell-like neighbourhoods’ (30 March 1999). Only when the authoritarian measures were obvious to all did the Guardian worry that children had been made into ‘the hooded enemy to be Asbo’d’ (Polly Toynbee, 4 July 2007).

The Guardian’s default distrust of ordinary people and its assumption that state authority is for the good makes it hard to sustain a coherent defence of civil liberties today.

MurrayMcDonald1@googlemail.com

Darfur: when 'peacekeeping' means colonialism

2007-08-27T19:13:00.000+01:00

It's true that an image can be worth a thousand words - just take a good look at the image above. It's a photograph of two UN Belgian troops who were caught trying to roast a Somali boy, yes, you got that right, ROAST him! This was an atrocity committed during the UN operation unfortunately entitled 'Restore Hope'. And what did these two 'peacekeeping' paratroopers receive for such a hideous crime? A month in prison, and the loss of a week’s wages.

Such crimes by UN troops in Third World countries are not isolated incidents, indeed, UN 'peacekeeping' forces, throughout the world are notorious for establishing such patterns of abuse. This is in fact a natural situation that foreign elite 'peacekeeping' forces find themselves in when confronted by events on the ground they cannot really begin to comprehend.

Of course, the boy in the photograph will never receive any real justice for the crime committed on him; this is mainly because UN forces are totally unaccountable to African people. The road that led UN troops to his home in Somalia was paved with so many good intentions by liberal interventionist in the West - all because such UN missions are deemed to be a good thing even if a 'few' Africans are brutalised on the way - this is what the people of Darfur have to look forward to.

Read on:

Darfur: colonised by ‘peacekeepers’. Spiked Online. 2007.

U.N. 'peacekeepers' rape women, children. World Net Daily.

U.N. suspends peacekeepers amid sex abuse charges. CNN.com/world. 2007.

New Allegations of Sexual Abuse by Peacekeepers in Africa. The New York Times. 2007.

Save Darfur: a Chatterati's wet dream

2007-08-23T23:04:00.000+01:00

The cause of peace in Africa can never be served by self-righteous liberals in the West who constantly make events on the ground in Africa sound far worse than they really are. These liberal interventionists honestly believe that people will only care about Africa if it can be presented to us in the most horrific way they can imagine.

George Clooney has been one of the worst culprits of only presenting Africa to us in the most lurid, and in many cases, the most inaccurate way possible, it doesn't seem to bother Clooney, who is by no stretch of the imagination an expert on African civil wars, seems to think his hot air on Darfur is beyond criticism and interrogation.

Clooney, and the rest of the Chattering classes in the West have cynically adopted Darfur as 'Our Righteous Cause'. They insist that the civil war in western Sudan is just a simple case of savage Africans trying to wipe out another set of African victims. The propaganda they use is to over exaggerate the scale of the suffering because it suits their morality tale, which is ready-made for simpletons. Indeed, Clooney has nothing of real substance to say that can actually clarify what is precisely going on in Darfur, his constant labelling of the civil war as a genocide is meant to flatter the listener and their sense of self-serving anger. It simply hasn't occurred to Clooney that his demands for Western military intervention in Darfur comes at a time when there was, and still is, a marked decline of armed conflict in the Darfur region.

The Chatterati like Clooney have got what they wanted, 26,000 heavily armed UN personnel roaming around Darfur, telling the Sudanese what to do in their own country. As far as I'm concerned, this is just as cynical as the Bush administrations military adventures in the Persian Gulf. Activists that support the latest UN interventions in Darfur are really no more than western apologists for militarism as a final solution in someone else's country, and to someone else's civil war, all just for their own moral self-gratification.

Save Darfur activists appear actively to distort public understanding of the complex debates that surrounds the question of Darfur, worst still, the relentless good victim verses the evil/Black Nazis presentation of the conflict is in fact having perverse effect on the ground. Indeed, an official from the American State Department back in 2004 told the world's press that instead of standing up and fighting the Khartoum government, the rebel faction the Justice and Equality Movement; "are doing everything possible to keep it going. The S.L.A. has never stood up to the army the way the S.P.L.A. did in the south. Instead, they’ve been very content to sit back, let the village burnings go on, let the killing go on, because the more international pressure that’s brought to bear on Khartoum, the stronger their position grows".

Mahmood Mamdani is an expert in African political affairs, he is also professor of Government at Columbia University, and author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror. In a recent essay he explores how Save Darfur activists have slowly transformed the Sudanese civil war into a platform for self-righteous moral posturing. I agree with much of Mamdani's sentiments regarding Save Darfur activists - for they have managed to systematically reduced a complex African civil war, that involves many armed factions and government troops fighting over land, water and grazing rights, down to one single word - 'genocide'. As far as Save Darfur activists are concerned, Darfur can only be described in lurid and exaggerated terminology. Mamdani talks about how newspaper 'writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence’, he adds that liberal interventionists are 'fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (“race”) and, if not that, certainly in “culture”.

Mamdani rightfully calls this the 'pornography of violence', it's for hardcore Save Darfur activist who think nothing of exaggerating the facts about how many people have died in Darfur. Take for example the Save Darfur Coalition who also work closely with Clooney, and all their international campaigns on TV, in the cinema, and their full page adverts in the press, have thought nothing of exaggerating mortality rates in Darfur. The worst thing about all of this, is that very few people will be 'aware' of how Sudan is literally being prostituted by Western interventionists, who appear hell bent on trampling over any Third World countries national sovereignty.

Original source material from here.

Let's celebrate the freedom of flight

2007-08-16T23:56:00.000+01:00

At a time when hundreds of miserable anti-flying protestors are descending on Heathrow airport at it's most busiest time of the year, hell bent on causing disruption - I think it’s high time we start to combat such eco-puritanism by celebrating our freedom to fly

As far as I’m concerned, what I’ve always found completely astonishing, is the fact that a machine of such size, weight and power, can transport me over great distances, at such high speeds, in the most inhospitable environment, with such safety, and at such a cheap price - that, in mine eye, can never be 'unethical', on the contrary, to me, that is nothing short of a miracle.

I’m constantly struck by how blasé most people appear to be when it comes to aviation safety, coupled with their low prices. I was at Heathrow airport only a week ago waiting for my £54 return flight to Shannon airport in Ireland with my fiancée, we always grab a coffee at the Costa Coffee, then sit by the windows so we can read, or watch the planes land. I’m constantly astounded each time I see one of those giant machines come swooping down from the clouds and touching down so smoothly on the runway.

I always find it heartening to know that modern flying has developed into the safest form of mass travel known to mankind. Indeed, the Executive Director of the European Aviation Safety Agency, Patrick Goudou reassured his audience at a recent EU/US International Aviation Safety Conference in Prague that ‘aviation remains the safest mode of travel’. The latest safety report from the International Air Transport Association also confirms that when aviation safety is concerned, Western-built jets are amongst the safest in the world with only one accident per 1.5 million flights – that is certainly a tremendously low accident rate by any stretch of the imagination, especially for something as complex as flying.

Even after having to endure all of Heathrow’s strict and tedious security procedures, nothing it seems can be more thrilling than the moment when your jet arrives at the runway, the engines are put into full thrust and you accelerate to a speed of 160 mph in three seconds flat, and off you go. Even though I might only have a rudimentary understanding of the science involved in flying, I still find myself astounded by the sight of the disappearing ground at Heathrow, and the rapid approach of the clouds – I think it’s about as close to miraculous as it will ever get.

Happy holidays to you all!

The Earth dies screaming, so pass the Courvoisier

2007-07-07T21:58:00.001+01:00

The Live Earth concerts is proof that the politics of environmentalism are rooted in middle-class hypocrisy.

I have yet to see many, or any seasoned environmental campaigners fully endorse the Live Earth 'extravaganza', indeed, even openDemocracy's very own green guru Oliver Tickell concedes that the 'whole cult of celebrity can be stomach-turning'. Well, if you ask me that is putting it mildly to say the least. We all know that celebrities like Madonna are opportunistic when it comes to worth while causes, one day they are for something, the next day they drop it and move on to yet another global event or cause. Tickell also points out the glaring contradictions of A-list celebrities like Madonna telling the little people how they should live their 'carbon-neutral' lives - yeah right, Madonna.

John Buckley of the CarbonFootprint.com told the Daily Mail how 'Madonna's Confessions tour produced 440 tonnes of CO2 in four months of last year. And that was just the flights between the countries, not taking into account the truckloads of equipment needed, the power to stage such a show and the transport of all the thousands of fans getting to the gigs'. The truth is, the real message of the Live Earth concerts is it's absolutely acceptable to be a millionaire pop-star, just so long as they get on a stage once and a while and tell the population how they should reduce their carbon footprint - breath-taking hypocrisy becomes socially acceptable.

The shear hypocrisy, and all of the glaring contradictions are neatly summed up by Live Earth's highly irritating little book entitled Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook. The author of the book is the multi-millionaire David de Rothschild from the same hyper-rich Rothschild banking dynasty. The book is packed full of unbearable ideas that pussyfoot around the problem of climate change - like for example, we are told to grow our own tomatoes, and if your cold at home, wear a jumper instead of turning the heating on. The book is, to all intents and purposes, a green version of our very own Holy Bible - the only difference is the Live Earth Global Survival Handbook is produced by a guilt-ridden, plummy-mouthed aristocrat who thinks he can tell the little people how they ought to live.

Global warming: two word argument for doing sweet FA

2007-06-29T07:20:00.000+01:00

The current debate surrounding global warming and climate change is enough to cause steam to come out of my ears - indeed, these days, the very mention of the words 'global warming' is more than enough to make me go out and buy a second-hand Colt 1911, with extra clips.

What I really hate is the fact that when any eco-worrier utters the words 'global warming' what they really want is the whole of humanity to just stop everything it’s doing - what the greens really desire is for everything to be put on hold, or worse, to be frozen to a stand-still. For example, every time we need to build new roads, the miserable greens shout 'No - what about global warming?' Every time we need to expand our airports, again we hear 'No - what about global warming?' Every time we need new power stations, 'oh no - what about global warming'? Every time we need new desalination plants, 'err no - what about global warming'?

The self-righteous crusade to fight global warming has become the number one argument for doing next to nothing - however, even if the greens are scientifically correct (which is still highly debatable), humanity cannot hope to solve any of it's problems simply by being in a state of stasis - if anything, history shows us that growth and rapid development equips humanity so it can, at the very least cope with anything that is thrown at it.

Genocide: and the tyranny of modern secular 'heresy-hunters'

2007-06-27T08:05:00.000+01:00

"Of certain Accusations that require particular Moderation and Prudence. It is an important maxim, that we ought to be very circumspect in the prosecution of witchcraft and heresy. The accusation of these two crimes may be vastly injurious to liberty, and productive of infinite oppression."

Quote by - Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu. From The Spirit of the Laws 1748.

Montesquieu was forced to publish his treatise on political theory anonymously because his works were subject to harsh censorship by the Catholic Church at the time. Nevertheless, despite being on the churches list of prohibited books, Montesquieu's works had a huge influence on the work of others, most notably, the founding fathers of the United States Constitution.

These days the Inquisition by the Catholic Church is utterly discredited - however, today's secular heresy-hunters are obsessed with the construction of new, secular taboos, like for example the questioning of the Holocaust. Indeed, a 10-year prison sentence awaits those who deny the Holocaust, or worse, if you refuse to oppose it in countries such as Austria, or Germany. The Holocaust is fast being hijacked and prostituted by all sorts of campaign groups and self-righteous individuals. There are many campaigners who are transforming the Holocaust into an all purpose brand, but the flippant use of the word Holocaust belittles the one and only true Holocaust committed by the West last century - indeed, the continual manipulation of the Holocaust metaphor turns the historic German/Western made tragedy into a mere caricature.

How many times have we heard about the 'Holocaust in Rwanda', or the Bosnian/Serbian Holocaust, or what about the 'African-American Holocaust'? Other campaigns have gone much further in belittling the murder of some 6 million Jews by Germany during WW2 - animal rights activist constantly talk about the 'Holocaust of chickens', or the 'Holocaust on your Plate'.

The Holocaust and genocide have become an all purpose brand for persuading people to back any two-bob campaign. Such campaigns insist that those who question their orthodoxy or version of events should be treated the same way that Austria treats Holocaust deniers - censored, criminalised, then put into prison for many years. Even in 'liberal and free' France, anyone who dares deny the Armenian genocide can be punished by imprisonment - so much for the liberty of free speech. Campaigners against denial have become the modern equivalent of heresy and blasphemy hunters. Indeed, some people can no long distinguish between two differing opinions any more - lazy, self-righteous campaigners simply shout that 'you are in denial'. The moment someone is charged with being in 'denial' whether it's about Rwanda, Darfur, or Global warming, there usually follows demands for 'deniers' to be censored as if they were heretics.

Of course not all secular heresy-hunters want their opponents silenced - what they want more than anything is to punish those who have the temerity to question conventional wisdom and truths. Just as today's Holocaust deniers are punished by imprisonment, so some campaigners talk about 'eco-crimes' for global warming deniers, or 'abetting genocide' for those who question the existence of genocide in Rwanda or Sudan.

As far as I'm concerned, it can never be legitimate to criminalise freedom of thought or free speech.

I'll leave the last words to people who truly understood the meaning of free speech, the French National Assembly of 1789. Who stated;

"The free communication of thought and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man. Any citizen can therefore speak, write and publish freely."

Also read:

Denial. By Frank Furedi. Spiked Online. 2007

Lee Jasper: the multiculturalists go insane

2007-05-25T09:58:00.000+01:00

This story starts back in early 2004, when a former High Court judge Sir John Blofeid, led an investigation into the death of David Bennett, a black schizophrenic patient. Blofeid's inquiry concluded at the time, that the mental health services were nothing but 'a festering abscess' of institutional racism. From then on, anyone and everyone seemed to agree that a strategy of 'leadership' and anti-racism was needed in order to combat what was perceived as 'institutional racism'.

So there it is, in a nutshell - the reason why people of Caribbean and African origin are over-represented in Britain's psychiatric wards is simply because psychiatric hospitals are akin to something like the British police force - institutionally racist. From this perspective, it stands to reason that what needs to be done is to drastically reduce the rate of ethnic minorities being detained in psychiatric hospitals.

Into this steps Lee Jasper, the anti-racist, mental health advisor to the Mayor of London, who told the BBC's Newsnight, that we are currently witnessing 'racism on an industrial scale' in psychiatric wards up and down the country. For Jasper, the Blofeid report and the subsequent national census entitled 'Count me in', are proof that mental health services are profoundly racist. Indeed, Jasper confidently asserted only 2 years ago at a national conference for professionals and carers that the national census 'confirms once and for all that mental health services are institutionally racist and overwhelmingly discriminatory. They're more about criminalising our community than caring for it'. This all sounds very alarming, however, there is no real need to be alarmed, mainly because Jasper is sadly wrong on these issues.

It doesn't seemed to have occurred to the national census 'Count me in', Judge Blofied, or New Labour's Jasper, that the reason why there seems to be a disproportionate amount of ethnic minorities in the mental health services, might be because there is a disproportionate amount of mental illness amongst ethnic minorities, especially in urban areas. The truth is, ethnic minorities in Britain are just as likely to suffer from a mental illness more than their white counterparts - this truth appears to shock many on the Left who find the notion unbelievable. Indeed, Jenny Daniells, a mental health worker told the Socialist Worker back in 2005 how shocking it was to 'walk into any secure mental health unit in London', and only to find out 'it will be full of young black men' - the truth can indeed be disturbing for some people

I agree with professor Swaran Singh - a respected consultant psychiatrist who argued that the constant labelling of psychiatric hospitals as a festering abscess of racism is not only erroneous, it's far worse than that, it's counter-productive. As professor Singh tried to explain to Newsnight, that the high prevalence of psychosis in ethnic communities and high rates of detention 'are not a result of racism'. So now it appears as if there is a huge reality gap - there is the reality of multiculturalists like Jasper who see 'racism' everywhere and anywhere he turns his head. In fact, for Jasper, there can be 'no other credible explanation' other than institutional racism he says. Yet, the reality according the latest research by the Institute of Psychiatry reveals a rather different story altogether.

For example, the latest AESOP (Aetiology and Ethnicity of Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses) study talks about 'remarkably high rates for schizophrenia and mania in both African-Caribbeans' - and that the 'findings held true for both men and women and were evident across all age groups'. The truth is, official anti-racists like Jasper are actually ignoring the real causes of why black people are over-represented in the mental heath services, and in doing so, he puts our community and patients lives at real risk. In fact, mental health tribunals are so frightened of being accused of institutional racism, that they release dangerous black mental health patients back into the community, in order to shake off such charges and basically hope for the best.

The research points to the fact that migrant communities, no matter where they come from, suffer from more mental health problems - and this applies to all migrant communities around the world. Indeed, white Britons who migrate to Australia are just as prone to suffer from high rates of psychosis as black people who migrate to Britain. The institutional racism/multicultural agenda is in fact insane because it makes matters worse for those who really need treatment.

Those who question the notion of institutional racism in the mental health services are perceived as being in denial of racism - but if you ask me, official anti-racism and multiculturalism are making the problem worse. Indeed, those who argue that mental health services are racist are doing the black community in inner cities no favours whatsoever.

Slavery: please, spare me all the apologies

2007-04-03T20:55:00.000+01:00

It is still not entirely self-evident as to why middle-class blacks are begging the British authorities to apologies for a social system that was abolished long before any of us were even born. Slavery was an accepted and legal social system up until abolition in 1807. There appears to be an ever-growing catalogue of groups claiming monies or apologies for events that occurred in the distant past. No doubt spurred on by more recent apologies, like Tony Blair apologising for the Irish potato famine, or the former American president Bill Clinton apologising to the Japanese for internment of their people during WW2.

If anything, the lives of today’s blacks in Britain, and the US are a million miles away even from today's Africans, let alone their ancestor who were physically forced into slavery over 200 years ago. Indeed, the only thing we as blacks have in common with our ancestors is DNA, that's about all. (1) The ever increasing calls for an apology sits quite nicely with today's Western therapy and compensation culture. It's as if apologies by our political masters acts as a therapeutic measure that will somehow help to solve any social problem there might be. (2)

However, loud calls for apologies over slavery actually end up reducing black people to the status of child abuse victims - who are apparently unable to get over the psychological trauma of being, err, well, black. From the perspective of those who argue for apologies, there is an insulting assumption that today's blacks are still shackled under the weight of slavery. An irony of sorts, given that it's black educationalists and lawyers who are the main driving force behind all this apologising. The advocates of apology have transformed themselves into a new industry that is forever redefining the meaning of suffering, and trying to turn it into ill-gotten cold cash, or apologies.

Don't get me wrong here, I welcome all the heated debates about British slave abolitionists and slave revolts - indeed, it's precisely why I call this blog neo-Jacobin, as a reminder of the work of C.L.R. James, in his historical account entitled The Black Jacobins, which detailed the Haitian Revolution, the first successful slave revolt in human history. What I really object to is the more recent prostitution of history that we have witnessed around the bicentenary 'celebrations'. (3) As Mick Hume rightfully points out, all the recent apologies around slavery are 'meaningless moral rituals'. Indeed, who ever heard of anyone going to prison for apologising for a crime they never committed?

So, what was the point of Ken Livingstone apologising? It appears as if he is trying to compete with William Wilberforce for popularity. All this apologising - but for what? So we can begin to heal some social wounds? Well, it won't work, how can it? Indeed, in a multicultural society dominated by the politics of identity and victimhood, saying that you are sorry will not be enough - no sooner as one apologies, sure enough another demand is made, and so on, and so on. No sooner had Tony Blair apologised, there were immediate calls for him to go further - even if he walked around the world in chains, it still wouldn't be enough. How could it be? You cannot compensate those who suffer from victim identity, if you could, it would render those identities redundant. For some, saying sorry is just not enough - so our political elites should do us all a favour and stop apologising.

Read on:

(1) Suing for slavery. By Josie Appleton. 2004

(2) Slavery reparation: why now?. By Josie Appleton. 2001

(3) Who's not sorry now. By Mick Hume. 2007

Photo: "The Slave Market, Atlanta, Ga". [Also known as "Auction & Negro Sales, Whitehall St."]. By George Barnard

It's war Jim, but not as we know it

2007-03-31T11:12:00.000+01:00

It appears as if Britain really is at war with Iran - well, a war of words to be more precise - and mealy-mouthed words at that. However, it seems that no one can hardly accuse the British government of being disproportionate in its response to this apparent act of war by Iran, or how the Times (London) puts it 'casus belli'.

Well, what else could you call the latest Iranian military actions? If anything, the ambush of some 15 British soldiers by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards represents something of a propaganda and military coup for the ever increasingly embattled Iranian authorities. When it comes to the art of war, the British government's image in the eyes of the world is increasingly perceived as second-rate and 'softly-softly'. Such a military strategy by Britain will only succeed in encouraging even more ambushes.

A week has now passed and the British government have failed to set any deadlines for the immediate release of the soldiers, it's as if our political class have been struck down with a chronic case of 'risk aversion'. There is a serious flip side to pursuing a cautious approach - such a risk averse strategy is actually bordering on moral cowardice in the face of the enemy.

It's as if the British government have fully and wholeheartedly embraced a cautionary strategy, that is remarkably similar to the doctrine commonly known as the Precautionary principle, much loved by the environmental movement, which states that under no circumstances should action be ever taken, unless you can be certain, without doubt that there will be no negative consequences as a result of your actions.

More recently, risk averse societies like Britain would tend to strike first on the basis that pre-emptive action was a legitimate form of self-defence. Today, the adoption of a precautionary strategy seems to have led to paralysis in policy making. It appears that our political elites are relying more on the words of lawyers in terms of strategic and political leadership. Our government itself seems paralysed in the face of a blatant act of war - they are fearful that any military action against Iran could have a negative 'boomerang effect' - so, instead of 'going in' and saving the marines, thereby averting a disaster, they fear that action would only realise another catastrophe - not the kind of things politicians really desire. (1)

Britain’s precautionary approach to Iran has only succeeded in slowly dragging this whole affair along, rather than settling it - none of this has been lost on the Iranian authorities who have used the past few days to ratchet up the political and military stakes. With a government like ours, there is one thing we can be certain of, their increasing obsession with risk, and aversion to risk, will only succeed in inviting even more ambushes, and other such 'gestures of defiance' in the not so distant future.

(1) The Risk Society at War: Terror, Technology and Strategy in the Twenty-First Century By Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen - p93 and p199.

Eco-alarmism: it's giving kids nightmares

2007-03-15T15:45:00.000+01:00

"[Scientists should consider stretching the truth] to get some broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have."

By Stephen H. Schneider, Prof., Dept. of Biological Sciences and Sr. Fellow Inst. for International Studies, Stanford University

For professor Schneider, the promotion of anxiety and fear around the issue of global warming is presented as if he was performing some sort of public service. Nevertheless, it seems that the idea of capturing the 'public's imagination' by offering 'scary scenarios' and 'dramatic statements' appear to have been more successful than Schneider could have possibly imagined. Indeed, a recent survey of 1,150 children between that ages of 7 and 11 are staying up at nights panicking about cataclysmic global warming.

A quarter of those kids surveyed actually blamed climate change on politicians. One in 10 kids questioned thought that recycling had something to do with riding a bicycle, and one in 7 thought their parents weren't doing enough to 'save the planet'. Even if we put some of the dodgy inaccuracies to one side, there is one thing we can be certain of, and that is, alarmist, one-sided, brain-numbing environmental propaganda, is having detrimental effects on the lives of British children in the here and now. Moreover, the situation looks set, in the near future, to get much worse.

Climate change alarmists like Schneider, Al Gore, or George Monbiot (to name just a few), have spent the past decade forcing global warming nightmares down children’s throats. Now surprise, surprise, children are having real nightmares about the hypothetical problems relating to global warming. If anything, as Lee Jones rightfully argued, this 'should be a wake-up call for all the purveyors of the ‘politics of fear’. However, the UK education secretary Alan Johnson has more eco-brainwashing plans for manipulating, and micromanaging the lives of British children. The plans are part of a new major review of the secondary school curriculum, with an added new emphasis on... you guessed it - climate change.

According to Mr Johnson, serious 'threats to the planet will remain if we don't take further action'. In a commentary piece for The Independent, ominously entitled 'Children must think differently', Mr Johnson argued that if 'we can instil in the next generation an understanding of how our actions can mitigate or cause global warming then we lock in a culture change that could, quite literally, save the world'. Sounds great, all this tampering with the school curriculum will 'quite literally, save the world!' Or will it?

The sociologist Frank Furedi argues that Mr Johnson's title of, education secretary, is in fact 'something of a misnomer'. Furedi points out that Johnson appears more preoccupied 'with using the classroom to transmit the latest and most fashionable prejudices'. It does appear as if Johnson cannot leave the school curriculum alone - for Johnson is not really interested in the academic discipline of geography, he appears much more interested in turning the school curriculum upside-down as a part of his green moral crusade.

I'll leave the last words to Alice, a seemingly frightened 10 year old from Plymouth, who wrote in to CBBC Newsround programme to talk about what scares her and keeps her awake at night - I wonder where she got this idea from?

"I fear that the gases all around me that are poisining our earth and atmosphere can either kill me or kill anmials while we sleep because if that's what they're doing to the earth they could do it to me!"

Read on:

Change or die - by PD Smith. The Guardian. 2006.

Be afraid, be very afraid... no, don't - by professor Frank Furedi. 2005.

Rosemary Behan: oh so fashionably anti-working class

2007-01-03T11:26:00.001+01:00

It’s seems that having a go at the lives of ordinary people is becoming a highly fashionable sport these days. No doubt spurred on by the Tories condescending ‘Tosser’ campaign - The Times (London) commentator, Rosemary Behan, has decided to let rip on all those people who have the temerity to bring themselves and their families to what Behan describes as “[h]ell’s fiery pit” – or in other words, the post-Christmas sales.

According to Behan, the people who go to the sales ‘show Britain at its ugly, undignified worst’ – stupid me for thinking it might be Britain’s foreign policy in Iraq, or Afghanistan that showed such things. Forget about the Helmand province, or Basra, for Behan, ‘hell’ is Brent Cross shopping centre – so who needs the Taleban or Islamic insurgents, when one has to rub shoulders with women who think nothing of buying ’17 pairs of shoes’?

For me, ‘hell’ would resemble downtown Baghdad, or even uptown Mogadishu – however, for the likes of Behan, it seems that such places pale into insignificance compared to being all alone, and unarmed in Next clothes shop, surrounded by packs of ‘wolves’, who cause poor shop assistants to run for their lives. Oh come-on Courtney, it’s a little bit of harmless tongue and cheek you might say, but to me, it’s more like organic munching, eco-miserable, middle-class prejudice masquerading as insightful sociological comment.

Behan concludes that in 2007 we should just ‘cut up your cards, leave the car at home and get a life’. I’d argue that highbrow miserabalists like Behan should speak for themselves.

Picture: Christmas rush in the Royal Arcade Norwich. By Robert White

The 'underclass'? There's no such thing

2006-12-13T14:56:00.000+01:00

As the title of this post suggests, I have a major problem with the entire concept of the 'underclass'. Firstly, in a modern capitalist society like Britain, there is no section of it that is apparently separate from it. Indeed, the term 'underclass', does not so much describe a section of society - but, is in fact a one word argument that separates poverty away from its social causes.

It's extremely instructive that a recent Conservative Party report warns of a ever growing 'underclass' in Britain - what is so surprising, is that it was the Tories who first rubbished the notion of the existence of a permanent economic underclass. Indeed, it was thinkers on the right who argued that the free market should be left alone to lift individuals out of poverty.

By using the term 'underclass', the Tories are openly admitting that they (and market forces) have no political solutions to poverty or unemployment anymore. Instead, abject poverty in the heartlands of Britain is presented as a consequence of immoral individuals who choose crime, and ducking from their social responsibilities. It stands to reason that such individuals only have themselves to blame for their impoverishment. The logic of the term 'underclass' is that nothing can be done to help such people - the term transforms what is essentially a socio-economic problem into a moral one.

Viewed from this perspective, there is only one logical solution to the problem of a 'growing underclass', that is the imposition of a strict moral code - hence the recent calls for the resurrection of Victorian values. In the past, debates about the urban poor ended with a consensus that led to the creation of the welfare state. Discussion of urban impoverishment today, seems to point the finger of blame squarely on the shoulders of the poor themselves.

Anti-working class elitism

The Tories former leader Iain Duncan Smith argued that;

"often people are finding as kids that their lives are already chartered ahead of them, because the of the broken nature, the dysfunctionality of their home life".

Instead of talking about mass unemployment and what the Tories can do about it, Duncan Smith seems to be far happier discussing 'dysfunctionality' in working class homes, and how such homes breed delinquent children. It's becoming very fashionable for our political elites to portray working class people as drug addicted football hooligans, who sponge off the dole, or who waste what little money they do have on crass materialism. This year alone the rhetoric has become markedly vulgar and crude, witness the 'Tosser' campaign relating to personal debt.

What's really important about Duncan Smith's pronouncement is what he didn't say. The argument about the 'underclass' is essentially a reactionary one, with unstated assumptions about a race of people who are apparently inferior to normal people in society. Similar sentiments were made over a century ago by Lord Rosebery; the problem then was how to improve the British imperial race. He argued that in;

"the great cities, in the rookeries and slums which still survive, an imperial race cannot be reared. You can scarcely produce anything in those foul nests of crime and disease but a progeny doomed from its birth to misery and ignominy" (Lord Rosebery, Questions of Empire, 1900, p.10)

Rosebery, like Duncan Smith, felt there was no question that those who lived in 'foul nests' shared in their responsibility for their own predicament. Back then, the moral condemnation of the urban poor drew a distinction between the undeserving poor and the deserving. The Tories' current report is, to all intents and purposes, a throwback to older, Victorian reactionary themes. The fact that the Tories' can openly talk about the lumpen 'underclass' is a stark reminder and indication of the demise of a leftist interpretation of society.

References:

Poverty and the Welfare State: Dispelling the myths. By professor Paul Spicker. A Catalyst pamphlet. 2002.

Thanks to professor Frank Furedi for his article The 'underclass': a race apart? Living Marxism 1991.

Car congestion? Simple, build more roads!

2006-12-02T18:19:00.000+01:00

The publication of Sir Rod Eddington's report on the future of transport, and roads in particular, seems to epitomise our political elites attitude towards cars these days. Indeed, comments made by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, a few years ago, illustrates perfectly contemporary attitudes towards modern motoring. The Mayor once said 'I hate cars. If I ever get any power again, I'll ban the lot'.

The debate about the future of transport and roads in the UK is dominated by bean counters and small-mindedness. Eddington's solution to future urban car congestion is simply to make drivers pay more for using congested roads and motorways during peak times - it took him all of some 350 pages to work that one out, how imaginative. The report is in reality, just an echo of the government's own mantra, that is, whatever happens, Britain cannot simply just build it's way out of the problem of congestion. In the foreword of the governments white paper on transport two years ago, the Prime Minister Tony Blair argued that Britain 'cannot simply build our way out of the problems we face'. It was a mantra that was repeated by his Transport Secretary Alistair Darling, in case you didn't quite get the message, he reminded everyone at a speech to the Institute of Public Policy - that - yes, you've guessed it, 'we cannot build our way out of the problem'. Ok, ok, ok, message received and understood.

To me, the report and it's solutions are, to all intents and purpose, a shining example of the politics of petty, small-minded, local green Nimbyism, that is being placed over and above the fundamental notion of providing universal provisions. Indeed, according to Eddington, 'there is no attractive alternative to road pricing'. Well, he's certainly wrong about that, because there is an 'attractive alternative' - BUILD MORE ROADS.

Eddington admits in the report that the invention of the car and motorways have improved the quality of our lives like never before in human history. He also accepts that the car has given us all more freedom and wealth in the process. The history of human development, is the history of making things bigger, better and more efficient. The report is bereft of vision, leadership, and more importantly bold ideas. The truth is, our society, the 5th wealthiest nation on the planet, needs new, bold and exciting ideas to deal with congestion. The only things that our political masters seem to have in mind is rock bottom horizons and taxing motorists out of existence - how novel.

For a more amusing and skeptical view on this issue take a look at the excellent Longrider's piece.

Hold on a minute, who you calling a tosser?

2006-12-01T08:31:00.000+01:00

It appears that the Conservative Party have stooped to an all time political low, head first, straight into the gutter with their latest condescending campaign. For some strange reason, the Tories seem to think it's perfectly acceptable to call, and let's not beat around the bush here, working class men, tossers. The campaign looks as if it could have come straight out of the Jamie Oliver school of nannying politics.

Nowadays, it's becoming commonplace to loath and hate the dreaded plebs in the lower orders, and to talk about them as if they were something horrible that you would normally scrape off the bottom of your shoes. Indeed, even the respectable middle class think it's perfectly fine to let rip on the working class these days - witness Greenpeace's campaign against people who drive 4x4 cars. It seems as far as the Tories, or Greenpeace (and New Labour for that matter) are concerned, the working class are just a bunch of undeserving, ignorant polluters who are addicted to shopping, flash living and easy credit.

Of course, the political elite can get away with such vituperative remarks about the lumpen 'chav' class these days, because the working class are no longer a distinctive political force to be reckoned with. Even upper class twits like Prince William, who would normally be too frightened to walk in the streets by himself, feels perfectly free to lampoon working class men without any comebacks whatsoever.

So, now we have the Tories struggling to legitimise their position by looking down their noses at those people who jump in a London taxi rather than get the tube home after a night out. There was a time when confident politicians used to offer the electorate political visions and ideas about how we go about building the Good Society - today, they only appear to offer 'advice', backed by the law for those who make the wrong 'choice'. If you ask me, the Tories appear more like an organisation of 'we-know-what's-best-for-you' councillors rather than politicians of progressive ideas and substance.

Guido Fawkes reminds us that the Conservative Party have some front lecturing people about getting into too much debt.

Slavery: reparations for today's blacks is immoral

2006-11-27T17:12:00.000+01:00

The issue of reparations for descendants of slaves, is on top of this weeks British political agenda - but, it's still not entirely self-evident as to why the British state should have to pay monies to today's blacks, for a system that was abolished long, long before any of our parents were even born (let alone my generation).

If anything, the very idea of reparation for today's black Briton’s is in the first instance, a diabolical insult. The assumption underlying reparation is that slavery still shackles the feet of today's black Briton's - this notion is rubbish. What I find most objectionable, is the fact that it's millionaire black American lawyers who are the driving force behind all much of this foolish talk.

Besides, Britain cannot seriously afford to entertain ideas about shelling out tonnes of cash to all who demand compensation for things that happened in the distant past - because, it would be only a matter of time before the descendents of Chinese opium dealers come banging on British court doors demanding millions in compensation. Followed closely behind by the Boston tea merchants, and why not South African Boer farmers?

Multi-million pound payouts will not heal any division there may be in our society, but it will surely succeed in incensing a whole generation of white Briton's who could rightfully argue that all this nonsense 'is not fair'.

Britain: the world's first 'Supernanny' state

2006-11-21T14:30:00.000+01:00

These day's, the modern British government's relations with its electorate is more like the way parents deal with wayward teenagers. A New Labour analyst pretty much confirmed this last year when they told The Guardian newspaper that the government; 'are like parents dealing with teenagers, who are unwilling to be controlled but not ready to take responsibility for their lives'.

If that doesn't sum up the way the government views the public, the Prime Minister will make it official today. According to the children's minister Beverley Hughes, the well-being of our kids are at risk unless the government deploys an army of supernannies for the benefit of parents. It makes you wonder how British society has managed to survive for so long without the help of New Labour's parenting experts. In the past, governments used to see the role of bringing up children as strictly a private matter - not any more. The tendency to interfere in private matters seems to be the driving motivational force for the government these days.

Apparently, Tony Blair did try to rubbish those who argued that the creation of a National Academy for Parenting Practitioner, was another form of state interfering and nannying - of course, the PM was right, Britain isn't a 'nanny state', it's more what The Times (London) would call a 'Supernanny state'. Britain is fast becoming a state that apparently knows what's best for you and me, and woe betide any fool who has the temerity not to sing government approved nursery rhymes to their babies.

Green campaign against flying is led by hypocrites

2006-11-16T11:04:00.000+01:00

The heavyweight environmentalist George Monbiot, has started a new website that claims to expose those who call themselves 'green', but are nothing of the sort. In the website, Monbiot argues that environmentalists 'all want people to live by codes rather stricter than those we apply to ourselves'. Of course, when it comes to flying, environmentalists are the biggest hypocrites of them all - including Monbiot.

For example, many of the leaders of environmentalist organisations are targeting the aviation industry as a major cause for concern, and a danger to the environment - yet, these leaders have been flying all over the globe to preach their anti-aviation sermons to a worldwide audience. If Monbiot wants to 'out' some dodgy 'greens' he can start with himself - ok, he's already done that. How about Ashok Sinha, the director of Stop the Climate Chaos, who flew to India for his holiday, and Montreal on a business trip?

Or, how about New Labour's environment minister, David Miliband, who's in Kenya for climate change talks? Ok, how about the chairman of the Environment Agency, Sir John Harman, who jets off to such places as Germany and Vienna for business, and likes to go to Cyprus and Croatia for holiday? Ok then, how about the organiser of a runway blockade at Midlands’s airport, John Sauven, who happens to be the campaign director of Greenpeace? Sauven likes to take his family to Italy for their holidays, and recently went on a 'business' trip to the Amazon rainforest in Brazil - very nice.

The director of Friends of the Earth, Tony Juniper, is also known to have jetted off to places like South Africa, Malaysia and Holland. He took his family to Slovakia last year, and is currently on a business trip in Nigeria at the moment. Or what about the Green party MEP Caroline Lucus? Lucas warned Briton's last year (all the way from Hong-Kong) about how a typical Christmas dinner may have travelled 30,000 miles to end up on our plates. She was also away in India last month on a business trip.

I'll leave the last words to Monbiot, who once said that 'If even the leaders of the green movement are not prepared to live without flying for pleasure then how can we expect that of other people?'

Read on:

A green snag they emitted to mention... By Johnathan Leake. The Sunday Times. 2006

Picture: A Plane Stupid activist at Leeds Bradford Airport. UK Indymedia.

'War' on climate change? Looks just as 'bogus' as the 'war on terror'

2006-11-13T21:10:00.001+01:00

According to Michael Meacher, the former environment minister, the British state is now apparently 'at war' over climate change, just like back 'in 1939'. The ex-minister added that 'I think we are at war over climate change and I think we [New Labour] can lead the country'. In case we didn't quite understand what Meacher was saying, he noted that global warming was a challenge to the very 'future of the human species on the planet'. Ok, message received.

Is Meacher really calling for the re-militarisation of our society, with his ideal image of WWII and wartime rationing? Even back then in 1930s, wartime rationing was only achievable by terrifying the British public into believing that Britain was about to be invaded, hence the need for militarising society and austerity measures.

More to the point, Meacher's bogus call to arms against climate change is totally unconvincing - the idea that the future of the whole of humanity somehow hangs in the balance because of climate change, is risible. This is not science speaking, Meacher's doom and gloom predictions are based on pure speculation.

Meacher once took the British government to task for its role in the bogus 'war on terror'. He bemoaned the fact that Britain had launched a full-scale war against Iraq based solely on dodgy information about WMD. Yet, Meacher's theories about the 'end of humanity' are just as 'bogus' as the original reasons why Britain went to war with Iraq. Indeed, Meacher’s theory has failed a basic test, Karl Popper's test of falsifiability. Meacher's dire warning says far more about him, than it does about the future of humanity.

Greenpeace: going backwards into the future

2006-11-11T15:02:00.000+01:00

The Guardian has reported that the owners of British Gas, Centrica, plan on building Britain's cleanest coal-fired power station. The plant will cost £1bn, and is thought it will be operational by 2011. Centrica plan on crushing the coal and turning it to synthetic gas, this gas will then fire the turbines. All the carbon produced during this process will be filtered out and pumped to the seabed in the North Sea for storage.

According to Centrica, the new station would only produce 0.15 tonnes of carbon per MW/hour, which is far better than their rivals E.ON and RWE, who's clean coal stations produce 0.7 tonnes per MW/hour. Centrica also claim their plant is suited to run on British-mined coal unlike their rivals. Sound great to me.

Except, the miserabalists at Greenpeace have condemned the project - I'd like to know, what on Earth have they got to object about? It's carbon free electricity production for crying out loud. A spokesman for Greenpeace, in the Times (London) tried to defend their highly dubious position by arguing that;

"This plant will lock us into another 50 years of wasted energy. Like all our outdated, crumbling power stations, this proposed plant will waste two thirds of the energy it generates as thrown away heat".

According to Greenpeace, there's no such thing as 'clean coal', that is just a myth. You'd think that a carbon free clean coal power station would be a step forward, and a cause for celebration for environmentalist - but oh no, miserabalism and backwardness seems to be the order of the day where Greenpeace is concerned.

Thanks to Daniel Ben-Ami for the heads-up on this one.

Plane Stupid: how dumb can this lot be?

2006-11-10T10:53:00.000+01:00

Plane Stupid activists have got to take the title of being the dumbest environmental organisation the world as ever seen - only last week the group attempted to occupy the 'London' headquaters of EasyJet, it was organised as a part of their ongoing national campaign against short haul flights.

So, true to form, this dumb outfit march off to occupy a building in London. Once there, they draped a massive banner on the roof, and formed a human chain around the entrance of the building. However, what this group failed to recognise was the fact they were not standing outside EasyJet's HQ - that, happens to be in Luton, not London.

As you can plainly see in the photograph above, this is the headquarters of EasyGroup, who are in charge of such things like cinema's, buses, pizza's, music, mobile phones and cruises - not aeroplanes.

I can't believe someone actually even posted photographic evidence of their stupidity on UK Indymedia.

UPDATE: Plane Stupid activists are trying to argue that easyGroup own easyJet, but this is not true.

The truth is;

easyJet is a public company of which the Haji-Ioannou family own around 49% (Stelios Hani-Ioannou does own the easyJet name which he leases back to the airline, but that is something very different). easyGroup is a private holding company which is owned by Stelios Haji-Ioannou. The Haji-Ioannou family interest in easyJet is not legally connected with or managed by easyGroup.

Current easyGroup businesses

easyInternetcafé
easyCar
easyMoney
easyCinema
easyCinema DVD Rental
easyBus
easy4men
easyPizza
easyMusic
easyCruise
easyValue
easy.com
easyJobs
easyHotel
easyWatch
easyTelecom
easyCafe

Carbon rationing? Thanks... but no thanks

2006-11-07T08:28:00.000+01:00

Normally whenever I think about rationing, I think about the period of instituted austerity for civilians during World War II, that didn't even end until the 1950s. The image is of people queuing up in long lines with ration books in hand to get their 'fair share' of scarce resources like food or clothing.

These days, the scarce resource seems to be energy, and environmentalists are demanding that it's time we made World War II like sacrifices for the sake of the planet. In the Newstatesman, Mark Lynas argues that it's not enough to drive less, fly less or consume less, we need to do much, much more that. Indeed, he argues that the;

"best indication of whether a person truly grasps the scale of the global climate crisis is not whether they drive a hybrid car or offset their flights, nor whether they subscribe to the Ecologist or plan to attach a wind turbine to their house. The most reliable indicator is whether they support carbon rationing".

In an era of plentiful, Lynas is openly advocating imposing harsh austerity. It hasn't even occurred to Lynas, or George Monbiot that there might be an alternative to green authoritarian carbon rationing. The author Daniel Ben-Ami points out that giant hydroelectric dams and nuclear power for example do not emit any greenhouse gas - geoengineering also offers many possibilities in the future in terms of energy. Ben-Ami also adds that carbon rationing 'would literally leave billions of people mired in poverty' - but what would environmentalists care about that? All they seemed to be bothered about is the 'war against climate change', like nothing else mattered

Flag burning? Why not, it's a free country

2006-10-31T12:01:00.000+01:00

The Guardian reported that the British police want to see the burning of flags at demonstrations in the UK outlawed. Indeed, the chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, Len Duvall argued that people;

"have the right to [demonstrate] but they must do so peacefully and without causing undue offence."

The Labour MP Shahid Malik also supports the police proposal; he added that these 'appear to be sensible proposals which I believe all sensible people, irrespective of religion or race, will support'.

Well, I'm sorry, but the police and Shahid Malik are talking complete and utter nonsense. For a start, the proposal is a blatant restriction on our right to free speech. I personally don't go around burning flags at demonstrations, but in a free society if other people want to do such things, why can't they?

Whether we like it or not, flag burning is a form of political speech. If the police, or anyone else for that matter finds it offensive, then that's just tough. I certainly wouldn't want to live in a society where the police determine how offensive a demonstration may be.

I militantly agree with Brendan O’Neill’s assessment of this issue, it's bad enough that free speech is under attack, on top of that, the police want to restrict our right to be offensive at demonstrations too - well, as O'Neill rightfully argued, they can just f**k right off.

Head of Commission for Racial Equality, is a bigot

2006-10-28T11:47:00.000+01:00

It's bad enough that the British government have unveiled a dodgy plan, to basically treat Romanians and Bulgarians as if they were the new 'white niggers' of Europe. On top of that, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Sir Trevor Phillips, thinks it's perfectly acceptable to label these migrants as 'racists' , even though he admits it's based solely on 'anecdotal evidence'.

Neil Davenport, a writer for Spiked Online recently commented that 'Phillips comments also show what a dramatic turn around there has been on the immigration debate'. He's not wrong there. In the past, it was old-fashioned racists who wanted tighter controls on immigration to keep blacks out. Today, it's anti-racists who demand stricter rules on new migrants all because they apparently want to stop 'racists' from coming into Britain. The truth is, old school, and new school ignorant attitudes towards immigrants, are just bad as each other.

UPDATE: The Times (London) also thinks that Trevor isn't all that clever.

This post is reprinted from the Wall of Speech blog.

Romanians & Bulgarians, being treated like white niggers

2006-10-23T12:03:00.001+01:00

Up until now, Britain, and the Irish Republic have allowed 'unlimited access' for migrants from European Union countries - not anymore.

Immigration to the UK, and Ireland, within the EU, has always been a hot issue ever since Poland joined the EU - however, the issue has taken a very disturbing turn for the worse. The Observer reports that the Home Secretary John Reid, will unveil plans to prevent thousands of people from Romania and Bulgaria coming to Britain to work.

In the past, draconian immigration laws were used to stop the flow of black immigration to the British Isles. Indeed, strict immigration laws were normally used as a way of keeping Britain all white, it also meant that new immigrants were seen as second-class citizens upon their arrival. These days however, politicians appear to bend over backwards by constantly reminding us that discussing restrictions on immigration 'is not racist'.

There are many leftists and liberals who seem to agree that restricting the right of free movement of undesirables like Romanians and Bulgarians is absolutely the best thing to do. Polly Toynbee argues that cheap imported labour actually serves to keep workers wages down - but as far as I'm concerned, such arguments are wrong and dangerous, they are what the revolutionary Russian leader Vladimir Lenin termed 'Social-Chauvinism'. If anything, workers have a common interest that transcend national borders. Pitting one section of the international workforce against another only serves to undermine international solidarity.

The notion that economic migrants from Eastern Europe are the sole reason why wages are low, actually lets New Labour and its Trade Unions off the hook. If workers' wages are low, then that is the fault of rubbish Trade Unions. Hostility towards an open door policy only reveals a profound hatred of freedom and the free movement of people. The demand to abolish all immigration controls is the only progressive answer to those who think the UK, and Ireland is 'full up' or being 'swamped' out.

PETA: they love animals, but hate humans

2006-10-17T12:59:00.000+01:00

Oh no, here we go again - the animal loving People For The Ethical Treament Of Animals (PETA), the famous liberators of chickens and all things furry, the people who gave us the "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign; have taken their nauseating political propaganda to new condescending heights. Except this time, PETA have gone too far, they have accused parents who feed their children meat of being nothing but child abusers.

I'd like to know how PETA gets off trying to equate loving parents with being akin to kiddie-fiddlers. It's an insult, and it's enough to turn someone like me into an animal hater. PETA tries to defend their highly dubious position by arguing that they are speaking on behalf of children - according to PETA, children;

"are inherently compassionate and interested in animals. They would be appalled to learn that each year in the United Kingdom, more than 900 million mammals and birds – and countless fish – are killed for food."

Oh really? Well, it soon doesn't take children too long to realise that premature death comes as a part of the territory of being a chicken, a pig or a fish. The truth is, PETA are indulging in the worse kind of animal-obsessed self-flagellation, they are actively putting the welfare of animals above the welfare of children, and above the needs of families for affordable meat.

PETA claims that chickens "are probably the most abused animals on the planet", well... I think they are certainly wrong about that one, that title should go to the men and women who have to wring chickens necks for a living.

Madonna: treating Africans like playthings

2006-10-14T11:13:00.000+01:00

There seems to be no end to the rumours that the multi-millionaire, ageing 'Queen of pop', Madonna is in the process of adopting an African baby that lives in a Malawi orphanage. Mind you, they still remain just stories at the moment without confirmation from her majesty Madonna herself, and her posh husband Guy Ritchie. Oh no, seems it's wasn't enough for Madonna to simply donate $3 million towards orphanages in Malawi - oh no, she just had to get herself one of those cute little orphans too. Well? What's wrong with that you may say, she's doing them a huge favour, isn't she?

Madonna, is an unashamed self-publicist, who's decadent perceptions seems to think it's perfectly acceptable to openly flaut Malawi laws on adoption all in order to get what she wants. What is more disturbing, is that the one year old African behind all this posing, David Banda, turns out he's not even an orphan anyway. The boy's father gave him up to the orphanage after his wife died, shortly after giving birth to David. The father simply couldn't afford to feed the baby.

The truth is, Madonna is treating all Africans as if they were children, just a little something to be played with, or even owned. She is simply following in the Victorian footsteps of Dr. David Livingston, and those other great 'saviours' of African people, like M'lud Sir Bob Geldof and his sidekick Bono.

Even Madonna's charity 'Raising Malawi' gives the impression that Africans are to be treated as if they were small children - it is condescending in its extremes. Does Madonna really believe that by snatching a baby boy away from his father and community, that this will be beneficial to the rest of the poverty stricken people left behind, after the world's press have moved on? Madonna has no answer to that, instead, she acts like a colonialist and treats the entire nation of Malawi as if it was just one of her little playthings.

UPDATE: The perils of adopting a non-orphan continue.

Remove politics from cancer

2006-10-09T17:59:00.000+01:00

Last week, the millionaire actress, Nicole Kidman came to London to mark the launch of Breast Cancer Awareness Month campaign. Kidman has a profoundly good reason for wanting to highlight breast cancer, her mother suffered from the terrible disease when she was only 17. For Kidman, and for many people, the fight against breast cancer is charged with emotionalism and subjectivity - however, we cannot, nor should we, allow the provision of cancer health care to be driven by such emotional campaigns.

The pink-ribbon breast cancer awareness campaign acually ends up pitching one cancer against another. The use of a high profile actress to bring this particular disease into the limelight risks dividing cancer sufferers - the pink-ribbon campaign has a tendency of pulling away the spotlight, and more importantly, it drives away precious resources from other cancer health research, like lung cancer. We should remember that lung cancer kills far more people than breast cancer in the UK. Lung cancer research hasn't got celebrities to stop the traffic to raise funds, or to influence debates and raise 'awareness'.

There is no doubt that cancer care in Britain needs to be radically improved, but the last thing we need is to attach values to different cancers based solely on its political profile. I'm not the only one who has reservations about the politicisation of breast cancer, the former professor of cancer medicine, Karol Sikora, argued in The Observer, that when;

"Nicole Kidman launched Breast Cancer Awareness Month at Madame Tussauds on Friday, she contributed to a process which will put breast cancer at a higher level than colon cancer in the political mind."

I don't think it's right, that when it comes down to rationing of resources in the health service, that breast cancer, with its pink-ribbons and high profile celebrities, is seen to fare better than any other cancer - is that really fair?

Update:

Do read: Honest Medicine's Julia Schopick responds to Sen. Joe Biden. Oct 2007

State funding for bankrupt political parties is immoral

2006-09-28T11:02:00.000+01:00

It's certainly offical - Britains two main established political parties, New Labour and the Conservatives, are financially bankrupt. It's estimated that Labour's debts are a hefty £27m, and the Tories are in debt to the tune of some £30m (which, they of course strenuosly deny).

Practical and financial support for both political parties have been in steady decline in recent years. Both parties have become increasingly dependent on finance from a hand full of very rich donors. In political terms, these are very dangerous developments. The astute political commentator, Mick Hume argues that such developments;

'highlight the advance of a new oligarchy in British politics - an elite political class, cut off from and largely unaccountable to any popular constituency'.

I haven't got a problem with individuals making political donations to parties, if anything, I have reservations about the idea that there should be limits on how much someone can donate to political parties - and, the fact that this idea coexists with ever more louder demands for public money for political parties makes the notion of limits on donations even more objectionable.

Both parties are in a financial mess of their own making, so why would anyone think that by effectively nationalising them, their problems would be somehow solved? Why would the parties financial dependency on state patronage make their political problems disappear?

If you ask me, political parties need to get out of the air-conditioned offices, and convince the public that they are worth donating money to - if they can't be bothered to do that, then they are certainly bankrupt in more ways than one.

UPDATE: The Times leading article agrees with me.

Plane Stupid? Yes, I agree, you are plain stupid

2006-09-26T15:14:00.000+01:00

Here we go again - yet another bunch of middle-class, low-fat, semi-skimmed milk latte drinking, self-appointed guardians of planet Earth are having a go at what is, to all intents and purposes, the cornerstone of our civilisation - the aviation industry. A group calling themselves Plane Stupid have declared war against the growth of aviation in Britain. They have accused British airports of being 'climate change criminals' (as if there was such a thing).

However, for all their talk of 'climate change criminals', environmentalists sustaina-babble has got it all wrong, again. Aircraft are not the terrible polluters that the organic food munching green media would have us believe. An indepth study by The Economist last year found that aircraft only produce 3.2 per cent of emissions, from a combined total of 27.4 per cent produced by all forms of transportation. Indeed, the study found that residential homes produce some 7.6 per cent of emissions. To put this in to perspective, electricity production cause some 33.9 per cent of emissions, so aircrafts are way down the polluting list.

The notion that a growing aviation industry is the arch villan of the global warming piece is risible to say the least. Also, the idea that people like me, who love to fly around the world for as little as 20 quid, are somehow aiding and abetting the 'climate change criminals' is also nothing but a sick joke. I've lost count of the number of times this year have I heard eco-worriers wanting to put a halt on some aspect of our civilisation, without one single thought as to how it would impact on peoples lives and livelihoods. Environmentalists and NIMBY's seem to forget that the era of cheap flights has meant that millions of Britons can go to foreign lands and seek out new horizons.

In general, cheap flights are one of the best things about Britain today, we can jet off to places like Spain or Greece for as little as £20 return. In the past, the cost of such flights would normally set you back some £200 - £300, a whole weeks wages for some people. Today, more and more Britons fly abroad for their holidays, to me, that's not stupid, that's a good thing going on.

Read on:

'Cheap flights should be a cause of national rejoicing'. By Brendan O’Neill. 2006.

I love cheap flights. By Brendan O'Neill. 2006.

Heathrow 'meets pollutant target'. BBC NEWS. 2006.

Aircraft emissions: The sky's the limit. From The Economist. 2006.

Picture: A Plane Stupid activist.

Abu Izzadeen: more media-whore, than religious 'warrior'

2006-09-22T13:17:00.000+01:00

Home Secretary John Reid certainly looked surprised when he was told by Abu Izzadeen, that the minister had some front coming 'to a Muslim area'. Well, even I was surprised by that, because since when has Leytonstone been a 'Muslim' area? The radical Muslim Abu Izzadeen, sounds as if he spends more time in wannabe 'jihadist' chatrooms than he does on the streets of E.11. For all his talk of speaking on behalf of Muslims worldwide, and even in places where he's never been to - what I'd really like to know is, how could such a babbling fool exercise so much influence over the British media?

Again, this morning on the BBC's flagship radio programme Today, proves that in this current political climate, you no longer need to have a convincing arguement, nor do you need support from a constituency to galvanise attention from the British media - all you need to do is proclaim that you speak on behalf of the oppressed, and constantly remind us that Muslims in Britain have never had so bad. Izzadeen does remind me of others who say they speak on behalf of other people, like for example, environmentalists who are forever banging on and on about doing something on behalf of the 'public', or for 'future generations'. Or, anti-abortionists who stand up for the rights of the unborn fetus. We shouldn't forget the anti-globalisationist, has-been pop star, Bob Geldof, who can hardly stop speaking on behalf of some 900 million Africans.

The truth is, Abu Izzadeen thinks nothing of exaggerating the extent of discrimination against Muslims in Britain. The sooner the British media stop flattering such self-indulgent emotionalism, the better for us to debate what really matters, like 'what do we stand for' - but, don't get me wrong here, in a secular and pluralistic society, Izzadeen should have the right to say what ever he wants (even though he openly admitted on the Today progamme that he hates free speech - wonder where he got that idea from?). It's a very real shame our government won't stand up and support such a fundamental belief, which is the very foundation of our open society - maybe if they did, radical Islamists like Izzadeen would be a mere footnote, rather than a front-page splash.

Update: Take a look at this excellent piece on the subject, by a guest writer over at Bob From Brockley

Jamie Oliver: it's time we stop feeding this crocodile

2006-09-19T17:03:00.000+01:00

There is a war taking place in the English county of Yorkshire right now, albeit a rather bloodless one, in which battle lines are being clearly drawn out. On the one side (my side) we have two sensible mums, Julie Critchlow and Sam Walker, their enemy is the self-serving, unelected political reptile, millionaire Jamie Oliver.

Winston Churchill once said, appeasement was 'a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last'. This is precisely what Tony Blair's government has done; it's appeased this overpaid cook and his army of dinner-ladies at every turn. The ease in which the authorities fell over themselves to jump on board Oliver's bogus 'revolution' should have been enough to set alarm bells going. Now it looks as if Oliver's political crusade is going flat, and about to backfire on him, and the authorities.

Ok, I admit that I'm slightly egging it up here, and so too are the Yorkshire mums Critchlow and Walker, but the reaction to the antics of the mothers warrants critical investigation. They are being portrayed and spoken of as if they were some kind of moral lepers, health campaigners have called the pair 'shameful and disgusting', A spokesman from Jamie Oliver has even accused the mothers of trying to 'shorten kids' lives', and you think I'm going over the top? On Oliver's show last night, he openly admitted he wanted more of a 'nanny state' approach to dealing with the 'a***holes and t***ers' (aka parents) who give their kids such horrible things as crisps and fizzy drinks.

The truth is, it's the government, and Jamie Oliver that view parents as 'a***holes and t***ers' who's only crime is to give their kids food that they like, and more importantly, will eat. Britain, under New Labour is certainly getting to be more conservative, more draconian and prejudice is rife. It’s only a matter of time before Jamie orders Blair to send in the ‘packed-lunch police’ to search the school kids for any hidden Mars bars or the like.

Picture: From 'feed me better school dinners'. Jamie Oliver website

Why are environmentalists putting bugs before scientific knowledge?

2006-09-19T12:31:00.001+01:00

A fellow blogger once asked me if there was any reason why I'm so against those who want to make the world a healthier, cleaner and nicer place to live? Why do I appear to be so anti-environmentalist? Well, the main reason is because; I believe that the ideology of environmentalism is becoming the number one intellectual counterattack to Enlightenment thinking. It's also fast becoming incompatible with systematic social development and progress.

A major premise of Enlightenment thought, is that central to the project of progress, is humanities increased ability to control nature for its own benefit - but, environmentalists are increasingly perceiving that human dominance over nature and the wholesale obliteration of the Earth as one and the same thing. Every single cornerstone of Western civilisation, and scientific endeavour that we normally take for granted, has come under a never ending stream of attack - everything from air-conditioners to the internal combustion engine, from nano technology to animal experiments are constantly bombarded by 'sceptics'.

Witness the bizarre spectacle of scientific development being halted all for the sake of a rare bug. That all sounds fair enough you might say, but why should a bug stand in the way of developments in extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology? To all intents and purposes, Mauna Kea (pictured above), is one of the most inhospitable terrains on Earth, other than humans, no other creature can survive there... oh, except the Wekiu bug that is. Protecting this bug will have profound implications for the future development of astronomy projects. What I find really disturbing is the fact that there is no evidence that the population of Wekiu bugs have been adversely effected by 30 years of building telescopes on the top of the mountain.

The telescopes on top of Mauna Kea, unlike the Wekiu bugs, have made a great contribution to our knowledge of the cosmos and the universe. The largest telescopes on Earth are situated there because the summit is high in the planets atmosphere, where the air is clear. There is really no other place like it - that is why, every single environmental crusade against such scientific and technological improvements, has very serious long-term consequences for us all.

The obsessions of environmentalists, like the banning of the pesticide DDT, to opposing the development of new telescopes, just shows who’s side their really on when it comes to social development and scientific progress. The banning of DDT has been a human disaster for millions of malaria victims, that has taken some30 years for environmentalists to realise. It’s true Lucy, environmentalists do certainly want a ‘healthier’, ‘cleaner’ and ‘nicer’ world, except it increasingly looks like they want a world with no human beings on it either.

Picture: View of Millimeter Valley. Produced by Williams College.

Save Darfur: from the pro-war 'humanitarian' interventionists.

2006-09-15T19:51:00.000+01:00

If there's one thing I've learnt about Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, or Somalia, it is, that Western wars of intervention don't work. I've concluded from these events that Western militarism cannot 'liberate', 'restore hope', or 'save' other people on their behalf - it just doesn't work. That's why I'm opposed to all Western wars of intervention. However, it seems that many people are drawing a rather different conclusion from those wars.

Many have concluded, that the ideas of national self-determination and sovereignty, are not even worth bothering to defend anymore. The principle of intervention is quietly put to one side, in favour of more intervention in order to uphold human rights. Even if the situation in Darfur is as bad as the pro-interventionists says it is, it's still won't be entirely self-evident as to what 10,000 heavily armed troops can do to stop the violence in western Sudan.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to many people that outside military interference might not improve matters for the people of Darfur. Sudan was just a little colonial plaything for the British up until 1956 - the country has been a divided hell-hole ever since. The current internationalising of Sudan's internal tensions, will only suceed in inflaming those tensions and exacerbating the conflict in the Darfur region. For all the talk about getting tough with the Sudanese government, there is little to scant consideration about what happens after the intervention - when the authorities have fallen, leaving behind them a dangerous vacuum.

You only need to take a look at Somalia, where the Americans, in a desperate move to stabilise the country, lent their support to the warlords who had booted them out, back in 1990's. The intervention led to the fall of Mogadishu, at the hands of an Islamic militia. It's a perfect example of how the policy of Western intervention can create an Islamic state in Somalia without too much effort. Doesn't anyone think it's about time we stopped begging incompetent Western leaders like President Bush, who can't even sort out New Orleans. Or worse still, the British Prime Minister Blair, who can't even sort out his own political party, let alone Darfur?

Anti-Drax activists? You must be joking?

2006-09-13T15:51:00.000+01:00

When I first heard that environmentalists wanted to close down Britain's newest and most efficent coal-fired power station, I thought this must be some sort of sick joke, right? Of course, I soon found out that it wasn't, and that this motley bunch of eco-worriers were deadly serious. What I'd like to know is, supposing the authorities did happen to lose all their marbles and cave in to the wishes of these protesters to shut down the power station on their behalf? What then? Shut down another power station, and another?

Drax provides Britain with some seven per cent of its electricity generating capacity. So, are we to just make do with seven per cent less power? What is their alternative to closing down every single coal-fired power station? One protester argued that closing Drax 'isn't enough to stop climate change but it's a start'. The truth is, these self-appointed protectors of planet Earth haven't got any real alternatives - their answer is to advocate ecological-austerity measures - because, that's what's hiding behind all the talk of switching over to 'sustainable' sources of enegy production like wind farms, even though they won't produce enough energy to meet with the current levels of consumption. So, we would be forced to make do with a lot less energy in the future.

It's certainly how one writer viewed it, he termed it, the New Austerity. As the author quite rightly mentions, environmentalists are not the only ones promoting 'green' austerity measures. From the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone and his phoney 'war on cars', to New Labour's 'eco' ID card, all would like our society to move towards a 'low carbon' economy. If anything, the anti-Drax campaign to close the power station can actually be viewed as a militant endorsement of the government's own 'low carbon' policy.

There is something quite disturbing about politically taking on coal-fired powers stations, because, it is questioning the very building blocks of our society, our energy infrastructure - the eco-activists forget that if we didn't have these power stations, our society would be unable to properly function. When we have power cuts like the ones we had in London in July, our lives pretty much just ground to a halt - but, is that what the anti-Drax activists really want? Do they really want our advanced, modern, technological society to revert back to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? To me, that's simply unthinkable - but, it increasingly appears that they are seriously considering just that, up there in Yorkshire, in their camps.

Picture: Anti-Drax protesters. From INDYMEDIA UK

Darfur: 'humanitarian' intervention, is even deadlier than the 'White Man's Burden'.

2006-09-11T17:10:00.000+01:00

Two years ago, Pieter Feith, an adviser on the European Union fact-finding mission to Sudan, expressed to the world's press, that '[w]e are not in the situation of genocide there...But it is clear there is widespread, silent and slow, killing going on, and village burning on a fairly large scale'. So... Ok, that seems pretty straight forward, no evidence of acts of genocide in Sudan. Then, last year, a UN led mission to Sudan, with, I might add, orders to investigate alledged acts of genocide, resoundly concluded in its 2005 report, that the '[g]overnment of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide'. In case you had trouble understanding that, the report repeats it again in the very next paragraph, that 'no genocidal policy has been pursued and implemented in Darfur by the Government authorities, directly or through the militias under their control'. Ok then... Message recieved.

So, why am I still being constantly told that there is systematic 'genocide' taking place in southern Sudan? How can it be, that the EU mission, and the UN mission cannot find any evidence of 'genocide', yet other individuals and organisations can? What is the motivation behind continually declaring there's genocide happening in Darfur? It's not designed to help the people of the region in any practical way. It looks more like an uncritical and simplistic presentation of the war in Darfur.

The demand for Western military intervention in Sudan's southern region of Darfur, have become extremely loud and popular these days. Everyone from millionaire actors like George Clooney, to most of the anti-war movement seem to agree that we should all rush and beg President Bush to 'Save Darfur'. All in the name of bringing this genocide to a halt, in order to save the people of southern Sudan from, well... themselves - but, they are wrong.

The consequences for the peoples of Darfur will be deadlier than ever before - far from resolving any of the Sudanese peoples problems, Western military interference is only likely to exacerbate the conflict in Darfur. A prolonged Western military engagement in Darfur, that is viewed in simple terms of 'good' verses 'evil'. A view where you have one side that's evil (the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed) who have to be punished, and, the other being hapless victims who need the urgent protection of the mighty West, will be a disaster for the region and its peoples.

Don't take my word for it, take a look at Somalia, Yugoslavia, Iraq... need I go on?

Also read: Humanitarian Intervention: Evolution of a Dangerous Doctrine - Empire? By Walden Bello. Global Policy Forum. 2006

Picture: US Army Image.

UK to license 'witches brew', sorry, I mean homoeopathic remedies

2006-09-04T17:25:00.000+01:00

When it comes to buying medicine in a high street pharmacy, it's always been a comfort to know that the product being purchased, actually does what it says it does. I've taken it completely for granted that pharmaceutical companies adopt a very strict regulatory Ronseal approach to their products, i.e... it 'does exactly what it says on the tin' school of medicine - but, it looks like thoughs days are well and truly over.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) which licenses all pharmaceuticals in the UK is about to introduce a new regulatory scheme for witches brew, sorry, I meant to say, homoeopathic products. Well... it might as well be described as witches brew, because, manufacturers of homoeopathic products only need to show the MHRA, that the product is safe, and, has been used to treat particular conditions like minor ailments such as colds, coughs and hay fever. What the homoeopathic industry does not have to do under this scheme is to produce any evidence of efficacy from clinical trials, unlike legitimate pharmaceutical companies who have to prove their products are safe and effective.

What I'd like to know is, why is the national regulatory body giving scientific credibility to homoeopathic medicine by 'licensing them', even though it's blatantly obvious that homoeopathic remedies only have a placebo effect? Michael Baum, a cancer surgeon and former professor, argues that: 'this is like licensing a witches' brew as medicine so long as the bat wings are sterile'. A very simular conclusion is drawn over at Harry's Place where the new scheme is roundly condemed as 'yet another cow-towing to irrational superstition', and I agree.

In its defense, the MHRA argued, that their key motivation for the scheme was not about boosting the homeopathic industry, but, about 'protecting consumers and promoting choice' - now, let me see, buzzwords like 'consumers' and 'choice', where have I heard that old chestnut before? It's as if the more I hear the word 'choice' being mentioned, the less real choice I'll actually get, and in this particular case, some lives will be put at risk in the very near future - so, you have been warned, the next time you want to buy something like anti-malaria tablets, to take with you on your nice foreign holiday, you'd better make sure you make the right 'choice', and avoid any homoeopathic remedies - like it was the plague.

In defense of BMW X5, and any other modern car

2006-08-29T09:09:00.000+01:00

Ok, let's get a few things straight here, firstly, I do not work for BMW, nor do I own a BMW X5, nor am I being paid by BMW to post this. I'm defending BMW, and in particular its X5 range against the ever increasing luddite, childish, small-minded attacks being made on it from the Alliance Against Urban 4x4's, and Greenpeace.

The prejudice of the bike-riding, muesli eating greens knows no bounds - their attacks on big cars like the BMW X5 has nothing to do with combatting carbon emissions, but, everything to do with attacking the type of people who drive them. I've heard drivers of 'Chelsea tractors' being referred to as 'vulgar', 'greedy', and just plain 'selfish'. Greenpeace, in their lastest advertisment no longer mind their language, and simply calls anyone who drives such cars a 'prick'.

These days it seems very fashionable for Guardian reading, eco-worriers to have-a-go at drivers of BMW X5's, Range Rovers or any other large modern box shaped car for that matter, but why? The green luddite Stephen Tindale of Greenpeace thinks Rover bosses are nothing but 'climate criminals' and climate-wreckers - but, hold on a minute here, are BMW X5's and Range Rovers really causing so much 'climate' destruction? It's true that BMW X5's and Range Rovers do push out more CO2 than any car on the road - a quick spin for example in a Range Rover Turbo Diesel will release some 299g of CO2 per kilometre. However, one cycle of a household dishwasher (something that's not too amiss in many a posh home in Hampstead - the centre of eco-worshipping), produces a whopping 756g of CO2, that's twice more than a Range Rover. So, where are all the campaigns against climate wrecking dishwashers then?

A petrol lawnmower produces over 1,000g of CO2 for every hour of use. London buses produces some 1406g of CO2 per kilometre, but, these are not the target of organic food munching Greenpeace supporters. The real target of environmentalist anti 4x4 campaign is not the actual car itself, but, the driver, as graphically dipicted in Greenpeace's new ad - behind all the talk of ecological carnage and safety is pure middle-class eco-snobbery. Worst still, these backward environmentalist attacks are being made on what are technological cornerstones of our modern civilisation - the 4x4 car.

The current environmentalists 'war on 4x4's', is just as dodgy on facts as New Labour's war on terror. When you scratch underneath the surface of these campaigns against large cars, what you find is dodgy science and blatant, high-brow middle-class attacks on the aspirational working class, the very people who drive X5's and Range Rovers. Anyone from footballers, mums on school runs, to skilled labourers like carpenters and plumbers are the very people these activists are looking down their nose at. According to the organic munching and Guardian reading activists, these people are 'clinically insane', or 'a complete idiot' and 'irresponsible', but for what? For having lots of disposable income and ideas above their station.

If anything, the childish, PC snobbery of Greenpeace's new advert is certainly enough to make me want go out and buy a state-of-the-art BMW X5, or a Range Rover (if I could afford it).

Read on:

The anti-4x4 ad that backfired. By Shirley Dent

Honk if you've had enough. By Brendan O'Neill

Paul McCartney's recipe for being a food dictator

2006-08-24T14:24:00.000+01:00

Over in the US, the millionaire popstar Sir Paul McCartney has been hitting the headlines. Not for taking the US government to task over its war in Iraq, but, for something far, far more important - the banning of goose and duck liver, more commonly known as foie gras.

McCartney's current crusade against foie gras has all the right ingredients, namely, the high moral ground and animals. Like most dictatorial campaigns these days, his stance over foie gras has certainly got a hefty sprinkling of emotions and feelings - which, to McCartney, seems to be much more important than that other little matter of hard cold facts. As far as M'lud McCartney is concerned, there is 'clearly nothing humane' about force feeding geese or ducks, the practice of this ancient art is 'inhumane' - end of story.

However, McCartney's unappetising war on foie gras, is in fact, just regurgitation of ill-founded prejudice against modern food production. Most of the facts that McCartney points out bear little relation to hard evidence. If a British or American politician had launched a war against foie gras, there would have been protests about 'cultural imperialism'. When one of the former Beatles does it, most people just swallow it hook, line and sinker.

So what is the truth about the production of foie gras? To start with, according to Ariane Daguin, an expert in foie gras, says that geese and ducks have a natural tendency of overeating before the winter sets in, so they can survive long periods of migration. The birds are in fact forced fed, but, this only lasts for about two weeks, and it's a gradual process that causes no stress to the animal according to French scientists.

McCartney also accused foie gras producers of 'mechanically inducing disease' in the birds, but, this is not true either. According to the French Interprofessional Committee for Fattened Waterfowl who commissioned a study entitled 'Everything You Need To Know About Foie Gras', states that foie gras 'does not come from an animal whose liver is sick. Rather, the liver must come from a healthy animal that has lived outdoors, and, at the adult stage, has been given a carefully monitored, abundant and progressive diet". So, where is the evidence that suggests ducks and geese are mechanically induced with diseases?

Of course, there is no hard evidence behind any of his accusations, but, M'lud McCartney doesn't need any evidence does he? Usually, for me, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, but, for McCartney and his silly draconian campaigns, that sort of thing is strictly for the birds.

Read on:

Super Chef vs. Governator: Todd English Fights For Foie Gras Rights. By Juliette Rossant (Superchefblog)

Wind power? More hot air than real power

2006-08-22T14:14:00.000+01:00

In a desperate bid to appear 'green', the Trade and Industry Secretary Alistair Darling has come up with an idea to force (notice not persuade) homeowners to put wind turbines on their roofs. Of course, to New Labour politicians, the idea of persuading 27 million people to do 'the right thing' and go 'green' is a daunting task to say the least.

Most political parties these days seem to be giving their support to wind power, however, this support has more to do with changing peoples ideas around energy consumption and changing our behaviour, than actually providing more energy for our use - why else would anyone promote wind power as an alternative to fossil fuel or nuclear power? Indeed, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingston thinks we should use less energy (be lean), and use renewable energy (be green). What his energy strategy doesn't mention is how a city like London can avoid damaging power cuts in the future.

The policy of hyping-up wind-generated energy is seriously flawed because it's not based on any critical analysis. Indeed, the European experience has shown that wind power is uncontrollable, variable and unpredictable - that's why it's misleading to describe wind power as a viable alternative energy source. Don't take my word for it, take a look at the world largest wind farm producers, Germany - an indepth report commisioned last year by the German Energy Agency states that wind generated energy is both 'expensive' and 'inefficient'.

Whether it's wind farms or personal turbines, the debate seems to be far removed from how we can properly power our country in the 21st century, but, more about shoving woolly environmental policies down peoples throats.

Read on:

Stop ill wind

Bomb plots? We should just refuse to be terrorised

2006-08-11T15:31:00.000+01:00

In the past, our political and cultural elites traditionally confronted terrorism by not allowing it to succeed in preventing us from going about our daily business. Not anymore - this attitude is much less in evidence today, especially with regards to recent responses to bomb threat on cross Atlantic airliners. Indeed, there is tendency towards promoting our vulnerbility.

The idea that an advanced society like Britain, is constantly under terrorist threat encourages a climate of fear, which in turn, just encourages more attacks. Confusion and a culture of fear are the main rewards for the terrorists. Indeed, how can it be, that an alleged plot to bring down a few airliners, cause a nation of 60 million strong Britons to be paralysed? This is one of the most advanced societies on the planet, with a successful economy, but is seemingly trapped in a culture of fear, with an acute aversion to taking any risks.

Matters of sercurity are top of the political agenda, adding to our current state of fear. Its worth noting, in the past our leaders' engaged terrorists by special means. Through small scale counter-terrorist operations and the use of intelligence - mainly against organised national liberation forces like the Provisional IRA. Today, our elites launch full scale wars, against a home-grown new breed of non-political nihilists. A breed for which terror is an end in itself.

One thing I know for sure, we can't afford to become traumatised by such events. This only succeeds in advertising our vulnerabilities. We need to pour emphasis on the idea of our resilience, our tanacity and perserverance. Professor Frank Furedi argues that ' the impact of the threat of terrorism is often psychological and its power is signficantly enhanced by the fears generated by a risk averse culture' (1). In other words, the terrorists most powerful weopon is our very own fears.

How many times have we been warned of how terrorists could strike at numerous stategic targets? To date, none of these things have happened - its as if Britain is just sitting around waiting for it to happen. In the meantime, Islamic wannabe terrorists go about organising hitting soft targets - the softer the target, the better to scare the mighty, powerful West with.
There is one thing we all know, whoever is behind any of these alleged bomb plots, do not pose a military or political threat to British state.

The rise of Islamophobia? Yeah right, whatever.

2006-08-09T10:04:00.000+01:00

Rarely, has a month gone by, were I'm not being constantly told, that Britain is somehow caught in the grip of an ever-increasing Islamophobic backlash. This time, it's the UK's highest-ranking Asian police officer, Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, who insists that anti-terror laws have 'indirectly discriminated against Muslims' in Britain. Furthermore, the commissioner is adamant that the 'cumulative effect of Islamophobia, both internationally and nationally, linked to social exclusion, has created a generation of angry young people who are vulnerable to exploitation'.

The commissioner paid particular attention to current police powers to stop-and-search, in the authorities desperate bid to fight against international terrorism. Massoud Shadjareh, chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, supported the commissioners statement, but, went much further and added that it's 'been clear for a very long time that there is institutional Islamophobia in the implementation of stop-and-search'. Everybody, it seems, are totally convinced that Muslims in the UK face systematic, institutionalised discrimination and harassment from the authorities, like never before.

However, there are some serious flaws with the notion of 'Islamophobia', firstly, the concept seems to be utterly meaningless - and secondly, the fact's about 'Islamophobia' don’t quite fit what is actually happening on the ground. There’s a profound gap between what is perceived to be true, and what actually happens to be true. The clearest example of this is the issue of apparent police harassment of the Muslim community. If 'institutional Islamophobia' was as endemic in the British police force as we're led to believe - then why has the number of Asians being stopped and search actually fallen in the past 4 years? Wouldn't we at least expect the figures of Asians being stopped, during an upsurge in Islamophobia, to have risen?

According to the lastest police figures, Asians do not disproportionately make up the numbers of people stopped and searched in the UK. Indeed, the lastest figures confirm that you are still '6 times' more likely to be stopped and searched if you're black, rather than Asian. In fact, Asians are only '1.8' times more likely to have been stopped during 2003/4, and only '1.9' times the year before that. But, what I really want to know is, why has nobody questioned the claim that Asians are being disproportionately harassed and searched by the police? The notion of 'Islamophobia' has become so uncritically accepted that very few people have even bothered to see if its claims are even true or not.

If there was such a thing as 'Institutional Islamophobia', it would surely show up in the police stop-and-search figures - but they don't. The truth is, the real victims of draconian police stop-and-search practices are black people. Not that the proponents of 'Institutional Islamophobia' would give a flying monkey about things like that it seems. What really matters to them is over-egging the fact that British Muslims have never had it so bad. However, the more that ‘Islamophobia’ is exaggerated by Muslim leaders, the more the Muslim community believe they are under constant attack. It’s not Islamophobia that’s blighting the lives of Muslims, it’s the perception of Islamophobia that’s doing all the damage, fostering a kind of siege mentality amoungst many in the Muslim community.

Picture: Islamophobia Demonstration. Trafalgar Square. Oct 2005

Climate change in Africa? Fight against malaria instead

2006-08-04T14:44:00.000+01:00

Environmentalists current obsession with the hypothetical problems relating to climate change, threatens to marginalize and overlook more pressing problems for humanity in the here and now – like, for example, the fight against malaria in Africa, and other Third World countries.

Environmentalists constantly bang on and on about forcing the most powerful leaders of the Western world to do this, that or the other, in order to ‘save us all from global warming’, but meanwhile in the real world, the body count for malaria in Africa alone is a million per year, and rising. What makes me really angry is that these deaths need not have occurred. In fact, all those death lead right back to earlier environmentalists political obsessions – the banning of pesticides.

Malaria, extinct in the Western world, is still killing Africans by the millions. But in the West, we’ve had the pleasure of using the miraculous life-saving pesticide known as DDT, which has all but eradicated malaria from the advanced world. Then came the World Wildlife Fund and the rest of the Green Gang calling for a worldwide ban on the use of DDT. They got their ban, now surprise, surprise, malaria; a once nearly defeated disease is killing more people globally than ever before. But who would have ever related environmentalist anti-DDT policy with millions of malaria related deaths and illnesses?

For all their talk about the dire urgency of spending billions, upon billions of dollars reducing carbon emissions in order to ‘stabilise the climate’ by one or two measly degrees, it seems that the life of human beings is in fact far, far less important than advancing the politics of their latest green obsession – climate change, like nothing else really matters.

Picture: Unicef file photo

Brick Lane and our right to be offensive

2006-07-28T10:20:00.000+01:00

Britain under New Labour has certainly become a more reactionary, conservative and oversensitive place to live and work. It seems as though the worst thing you could possibly do to someone is offend their feelings or sensibilities. Witness the bizarre spectacle of Ruby Films being forced to shoot a film about Brick Lane in another location, all because some locals have objections about the content of the film being made.

Abdus Salique, the self-appointed leader of the Brick Lane 'community' has gone further and has threatened to blockade streets in the area and burn Monica Ali's book, 'Brick Lane' at a forthcoming demonstration this Sunday. Salique also added that if Monica "has the right to freedom of speech, we have the right to burn books. We will do it to show our anger. We don't like Monica Ali. We are protecting our community's dignity and respect."

Well, I'm sorry, but that is blatantly ridiculous. Imagine a society where we have to avoid hurting someone's feelings all the time. The simple answer to that, is we would never say or write anything that smacked of controversy anymore. The problem is, people in a truly free and open society express strong opinions, they also uphold deep and sincer beliefs that might upset some people - but, that's just tough, that's life. Nobody has the right to demand silence from those who have hurt their feelings or who have offended their sensibilities.

I don't know about Salique and his bunch of miserable book burning zealots, but, what I do know is I want to live in a society that is open and free, I want a society where we feel free to say or film whatever we choose. I'd suggest that those like Salique who want to live in a world devoid of any offensive thoughts and ideas, that they should take up being a Benedictine monk instead.

UPDATE: I also recommend you look at this highly opinionated post by the Pub Philosopher. No apologies if this post causes great offense.

Environmentalism, it should be classed as a religion

2006-07-27T18:28:00.000+01:00

Environmentalism seems to be converting what are legitimate concerns into some all-purpose cult like religion. It's fast becoming the supreme source and standard of all values in human day-to-day life. Humanity, does in fact, face a very real threat in the future, but, it's not from the melting polar ice-caps, or from too many hurricanes. The danger isn't from the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, nor is it from planetary levels of CO2, or global warming - the threat comes from environmentalism itself.

What are the fundamental goals of environmentalism? Is it a project to advance human health and life? Why has nature become valued above humanity, and why is the natural world worshipped like some kind of primitive religion? Environmentalists loathing of the industrial world, and of the technological and scientific revolutions, demonstrates perfectly their contempt for humanity. Otherwise, they would welcome and support the technological and scientific achievements that have eradicated pestilence, famine and diseases that had plagued humanity before the Industrial Revolution.

When environmentalists talk about 'sustainability', what exactly are they talking about? What does sustainability really mean? In reality, and in social terms, it actually means satsis, an abnormal state of inactivity, to sustain oneself you need to stand still, to not make great stride forwards, to not make progress - because, at the end of the day, what exactly is the ideal world for the environmentalist? It's certainly not 21st-century Western civilisation that's for sure - it's more like the Garden of Eden, or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Environmentalism is being forced down our throats like never before. According to one well known climatologist, the Rt Rev Richard Chartres, a bishop in the Church of England, those who do not repent at his altar of global warming righteousness, are deemed not holy enough for his forgiveness. Indeed, the wrath of the mighty and holy church (of environmentalism) will be bought to bare against the sinners who have the termerity to go 'flying on holiday or buy a large car'. Imagine having the bare face cheek to go on holiday, or to buy a 4x4? Global warming is no longer even a scientific issue these days, as Rev Chartres argues, we "stand before God’s judgment on these matters."

Authoritarianism: ID card's through the 'green' door

2006-07-20T12:19:00.000+01:00

Everytime I talk about 'green' authoritarianism, I'm constantly told that I'm exaggerating the extent of any authoritarian streak environmentalists may have. Well... I say don't take my word for it, take a quick look at what the environmental secretary, David Miliband (pictured right) has in store for us all. He's proposing a scheme that would force people to carry a swipe card, that would have to be presented whenever you make a purchase. Apparently, everyone from the 'Queen down' would be expected to account for their carbon 'footprint' by being allocated a 'personal' and annual carbon allowance.

David Adam, environment correspondent for the Guardian, made a very important point about this 'green' scheme; "The move marks the first serious step towards state-enforced limits on the carbon use of individuals". Adam's also mentions that the scheme "extends the principle of carbon trading - already in place between heavy polluters such as power companies and steel makers - to consumers, with heavy carbon users forced to buy unused allowances from people with greener lifestyles".

Just in case you thought you might still have some individual choice in the matter, Colin Challen, Labour chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on climate change, added that "it will inevitably have to be introduced so that consumers, along with other sectors, take responsibility for what they do". So now it looks as if we will have no choice but to accept the governments draconian measures to 'fight against climate change', and the Isle of Wight looks set to be 'green' guinea pigs for Milibands pilot scheme - apparently, it's the 'obvious' place for a pilot (only because it's an island, so you can't get off). Funny thing is, Challen seemed apprehensive about testing this scheme on the people of the Isle of Wight - indeed, he moaned that he was "not sure how happy they would be with that". Well.. If they wanted to make people 'happy', they should first stop trying to sneak in compulsory ID cards through the 'green' door for a start.

All the Middle East's a stage

2006-07-19T14:41:00.000+01:00

The kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah, has set into motion dreadful and appalling consequences for the people of the Middle East. The region is now fast becoming a worldwide stage-show, a theater where militarised public relations stunts are now pretty much the norm.

William Shakespeare once wrote that; "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players". All sides and players in this conflict seem to be playing to the gallery, or in other words, all sides are hell-bent on provoking reactions that are guaranteed to get the most amount of international coverage and media headlines. Take for example Hezbollah's threat to engage in a 'all-out-war', but, the reality is rather different, wildly firing rockets in the general direction of Israel and snatching a couple of squaddies does not really amount to much, let alone all out war. In Clausewitzian terms, Hezbollah and Hamas are engaging not in an 'all-out-war', but more a militarised PR stunts.

The same can be said for Israeli military strategy at present. For example, the bombing of Beirut airport and bridges are simply symbolic gestures on the part of Israel. These bombings will not end Hezbollah attacks in southern Lebanon, so what was the point? With Israel becoming more, and more isolated throughout the world than ever before, Israel finds itself under emence pressure to demonstrate it's continuing authority. However, these demonstrations of Israeli might have unforeseen consequencies for Israel, and for the rest of the Middle East.

The danger now, is that the Middle East is heading towards a process of 'Balkanisation' as pointed out by Mick Hume;

"Things are unravelling across the Middle East, raising the danger of an increased Balkanisation of the region as states fall apart. It is not that the conflict is worse than in the past; the military exchanges have been pale shadows of the wars and invasions of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 or even 1982. But from America downwards, none of the political players involved today is capable of getting a grip on events."

All of the political players in this current cycle of bombing and counter bombing are being swept away by events - there seems to be no end game in sight - but, if there's one thing I know, is that the solution to all of this military mess rests solely with the peoples of the Middle East, and no one else. Not the UN, the EU, the G8 or NGO's, they all just need to keep their dirty meddling hands off.

The rise, and rise of 'green' authoritarianism

2006-07-14T12:47:00.000+01:00

Donna Challice (pictured left), a single mother of three children from Exeter, has become the first person to be charged and prosecuted for alledgely failing to recycle her household waste properly. Exeter city council have accussed Challice of putting improper waste, like food into her 'green' recycling bin, kindly provided by the new green authoritarians, Exeter city council.

However, the council did not have any evidence whatsoever that Challice had contaminated the recycling bin. Indeed, the miserabalist Mike Trim, who is the recycling officer for the council tried to argue that it 'will be hard to bring cases like this if there has to be direct evidence of an individual contaminating a recycling bin'. Stupid me, thinking that you need 'direct evidence' before you can prosecute someone for a crime. Fortunately, for Challice, the local magistrates decided to throw the councils case out of court because... you guessed it, 'there was insufficient evidence to convict' Challice.

I suppose now we can expect council jobsworth like Mike Trim, to be hiding in bushes near you soon, armed with a pair of binoculars, a dictaphone and a camera with a zoom lens, at the ready to get his 'direct evidence', and woe betide any man, woman or child that has the termerity to flout the city council's ribbish, draconian 'green' recycling policies.

Picture: The Times (London). 2006

Peter Tatchell: the real threat to free speech

2006-07-13T17:38:00.000+01:00

"Does free speech include the right to encourage racist and homophobic murder? Asks Peter Tatchell in an article he wrote on comment is free - well... the answer to that is 'yes, it does'. As far as I'm concerned, music, in and of itself, is a straight issue of free speech. We either have the right to play, sing or listen to whatever music takes our fancy, or we don't have that right. It's as simple as that.
Alternatively, we could have a new 'free speech aparthied', which is what Tatchell, and the rest of his ban-happy-mob really wants, but, they are so dishonest, they wouldn't openly admit that. Tatchell, and his followers of cronies apparently do believe in the idea that free speech is a worthy cause, so long as they have made their approval of it first. If they don't approve, then they do what they did last week, and run to the police to stamp over somebody else's right to free speech. As Brendan O'Neill quite rightly argues, Tatchell, and his band of free-speech-is-ok-but floozies 'have no shame' in begging the police to clamp down on black peoples rights and freedoms.

Modern jet-set lifestyle, represents freedom

2006-07-12T12:40:00.000+01:00

Those professional miserabalists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change published a report late last year, which suggests that the government needs to put the brakes on air travel in the future if we are to combat climate change. The current environmentalist obsession with reducing CO2 emissions means that any growth in aviation would be catastrophic to their main aim of 'decarbonising' the planet and 'stabilising' the climate.

I've always thought it was quite funny and hypocritical how ecological journalists, activists and politician's jet around the planet in order to tell a worldwide audience that the aviation industry was eco-enemy number one. Indeed, some went further by arguing that flying in a jet plane was just as bad as being a child abuser. How jetting to the Mediterranean, or America, once a year can be equated with being a kiddie fiddler is not difficult to understand, if you're a hardcore environmentalist.

'Global warming means that flying across the Atlantic is now as unacceptable as child abuse'. Well... I fly across the Atlantic (and elsewhere), on a regular basis, and I view my travel around the globe as a fundamental freedom that simply cannot be curtailed. But environmentalists like the columnist George Monbiot, thinks my jet-set lifestyle is akin to being a child abuser. Monboit and other eco-worriers are pointing their green fingers at those awful people like me who are quick to jump on jet planes because the price is so cheap - how could I unthinkingly jet to the Med, or the States, and pollute as I go?

In fact, air travel is not a problem. If there is a problem with air travel, is that it's still over priced for my liking - and should be cheaper still. In any case, cheap air travel has meant that millions of ordinary Britons can now explore the world, and seek out new horizons. Why anyone in Britain would want to go to Blackpool or Skegness for their summer holidays is beyond me (I'd rather not bother going on holiday at all). That seems to be the objective behind environmentalist concerns with cheap air travel, to get all those cultureless proles to abandon their jet-set lifestyle and settle for the cold waters of Hastings, or Brighton instead.

Any curbs on cheap air travel is a direct attack on my freedom to travel anywhere I want to go. I consider jumping on a jet plane as a liberating experience - what we need is a bit more 'skies the limit' thinking, not the middle-class miserable morality of reduced consumption and sustainability.

Really good arguments against nuclear power? Well... I haven't heard any yet!

2006-07-11T12:56:00.000+01:00

The issue of nuclear power has exploded back on the political table in Britain, like never before. Everyone seems to agree that the UK desperately needs to find a way to secure our future enrgy supplies - and at the same time, commit Britain to the strict Kyoto Protocol programme of global-decarbonisation.

However, this debate in Britain is effectively being run soley by anti-science/nuclear environmentalist organisations like the Sustainable Development Commission - yeah right, who are they? When it comes to the issue of nuclear power, it is these people who have had all the running. Backed, and funded by New Labour, and supported by nearly every other Green party/organisations throughout the country.

Who knows, there might really be a decent argument out there for opposing the development of nuclear energy and science - but I have not heard a decent one yet. All I've heard is scaremongering of the highest order, from an un-elected quango, who actively seek to deny our society even the mearest possibilty of developing nuclear science for such things as medicine, or for transport, and of course, as a source of energy.

If you ask me, I think the SDC is suffering from a mild dose of radiation sickness. How else can you explain their statement that 'a new nuclear programme would give out the wrong signal to consumers'? The wrong signal? Ahh... you mean we might get the foolish idea that state-of-the-art nuclear power stations, up and down the country, will stop us believing that we have to consume less energy - when, in fact, we'll be able to buy even more energy than ever before, and for less money as well - instead of being brainwashed into believing that we should make do with a lot less energy.

The SDC are deep down dishonest, why don't they just come out with it, and openly say they despise most new technologies, especially nuclear, they don't trust ordinary people, and they think the skies going to collaspe on their heads.

Our modern way of life, is second to none!

2006-07-03T18:02:00.000+01:00

I have total faith in the Western modern way of living. I'm sick to the teeth with those who continually bombard my hightech, multimedia communication systems, banging on and on, about how the modern way of living is a complete nightmare, or worse - a total disaster.

Our society has indeed lost faith. There is no faith even in its own finest achievements. People in the West now live longer, are richer in wealth, and fitter in health than ever before. Even those who are now classified as poor in developed societies like mine (the UK), have access to goods and services that are far beyond even the imagination of the super-rich a century ago.

I've heard modern farming methods described as 'like Auschwitz'. Modern food is more often as not, described as 'toxic' - the people who eat food bought from supermarkets are said to be in a state of 'toxic overload'. Modern medicine is deemed by many to be the real killer of people, and not the other way around. But the real truth is, there is no substance to most of these stories. Critics of the project of modernity have no real viable alternative to it. Critics of modernism seem to want less and less technological advances, not more. The critics of the modern way of life would love humanity to go back to a 'pre-modern era', ie... back to the caves no doubt.

I want to see the unfettered growth of Western science and its application in society, and throughout the world. It was not wars that led to great social change in the past, it was the compass and the telescope that overthrew religious fuedalism over two hundred years ago. The broadband internet is my weapon of choice against the modern day philistines. So viva modernity and Western science - because, this is what I have faith in.

Picture: Erno Goldfinger building in Elephant & Castle. London. 2006.

Middle-class blacks, hiding behind reparation movements

2006-06-30T10:40:00.000+01:00

The issue of reparation for descendants of slaves is only really a serious matter for Americans, for now. It's not absolutely clear as to why Americans, in the here and now, should pay monies to today's black Americans for a system that was abolished long before any of us were even born.

Some black reparation groups have calculated how much is due to today's black Americans, the results are nothing but a complete and utter joke. The African American Reparation Action Network calculates with inflation that every single afro-American is owed 40 acres and $100,000, or $200,000 without the land. Other organisations think the sum owed maybe 40 acres and a mule, but, does anyone know what the going rate of a mule is?

More enlightened commentators have rightfully highlighted the fact that the issue of 'slavery is a messy and complex story - in the real world, trying to identify the beneficiaries and victims of slavery would be an impossible task'. So, knelling down before a crowd of Africans and 'begging for forgiveness' can serve no real purpose, other than attempting to absolve the individual of their own self-loathing.

Time magazine's columnist Jack White, thinks black Americans are owed a whopping $24 trillion on the basis of unpaid wages not paid to some 10 million slaves. Others have calculated that between 1620 and 1865 unpaid slave labour at today's prices should total some $9.7trillion. Some of these calculations have been doubled to take account of 'pain and suffering'. But hey... why double it? Why don't they just quadruple it?

In the past reparation was demanded by black separatists movement in order to fund an independent black republic. Today, the call for reparation is about national unification and social healing. To date, at least 10 US city councils have endorsed the idea of federal 'impact statement' on slavery. Indeed, top American lawyers have lunched lawsuits against big businesses that have profited from slavery.

None of this could happen were it not for the favourable climate of self-loathing and compensation culture in the West. Apparently, America is so sick and divided, and in need of healing, the only antidote is to shell out tonnes of hard cold cash to all and sundry. America is said to be in denial, and reconciliation is the answer. If you ask me, black Americans are being treated like child abuse victims, who just can't get over the trauma of being... well... black. The idea that the imaginary chains of slavery still shackle the feet of today's black Americans is in the first case a diabolical insult. Secondly, the irony of all this is that millionaire black American lawyers are the driving force behind all this nonsense.

Spurred on by legal and financial success against the tobacco industry, black lawyers are running to the courts in order to claim reparation. If these lawyers win their case it will lead to an avalanche of even bigger and stranger cases in the near future.

Britain should take note of these cases, because if they succeed, Britain can expect decendents of Chinese opium dealers banging on the doors of British courts demanding tonnes of cash for compensation. Followed by South African Boer farmers, and why not the Boston tea merchants? The list goes on and on.

In reality it will take more than the wealth of the entire economy of America to 'heal' it's divisions. Besides, multi-million dollar payouts to blacks will not heal America - it can only succeed in incensing a whole generation of white Americans who can rightfully argue that 'it's not fair'.

Picture: African Merchant Selling Slaves to a European, no date

Say 'NO' to state funding for political parties

2006-06-28T14:35:00.000+01:00

How can it be that major political parties are debating whether the public should chip in and prop up their organisations bank accounts? That's the sickest idea I've heard this year. What? Us pay for the up-keep of the New Labour Party? What? Voluntarily? Well... that sounds sick to me - because, no political party has the right to exist, indefinitely. Talk about dependancy culture.

The state, under no circumstances, should be financing any political party - if supporters of New Labour, the Tories, or the Lib-Dems cannot cough up monies in support of their own parties, then why should we?

New Labour is said to be in debt to the tune of some £20 million, there's a really good reason for that - it's because they have no support from it's core constituency anymore - Tony Blair runs a mass political party, that has no mass of people in it. He has been forced to look elsewhere for funding the parties electioneering bureaucracy.

The truth is, New Labour, and the Tories are financally bankrupt - for the state to step in and bankroll the two parties would be suicidal for our democracy. Firsly, it would complete the parties transformation from a mass based people's party, into the new political oligarchy, devoid of any genuine popular support.

This crucial point was not lost on Clare Short, when she spoke of the isolation of New Labour elites, in the wake of the 'loans for peerage' scandal. The scandal exposed the nature of the 'bubble' that the New Labour elites now find themselves in.

Bankrolling bankrupt parties will solve nothing, but make matters far, far worse for us all.

Picture: Rene Magritte The Month of the Grape Harvest. 1959. Oil on canvas.

Pro-science blog: stand up for science!

2006-06-28T11:40:00.000+01:00

The Oxford based pro-vivisection group Pro-Test, also has a very interesting blog called Standing Up For Science attached to it. It's run by Kristina Cook, a PhD student at Oxford University. I wish Cook, and her blog the very best of luck in the future.

We seem to be living in a time where humanities ability to overcome it's problems through the consistant application of reason and scientific inquiry, is taking quite a serious hammering these days. So, it's good to know that there are some people out there, that are prepared to put their necks on the line in order to defend and promote scientific research, in the face of threats from animal rights activists and thugs. As a student at Oxford, Cook is currently searching for potential new ways of treating cancer, I support her work wholeheartedly - so should you.

Forget the Queen's 80th, what about our liberty, sovereignty and democracy?

2006-06-16T17:15:00.000+01:00

The arch ruler Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, or, the Queen for short, has turned into an octigenarian. We will all be expected to show our deep felt respect for the Queen, and for all of her past 'achievements' on her 80th birthday. We'll also be expected to sing a long to that old tired anthem 'God Save the Queen' as well.

It's said that Her Majesty is 'universally respected' the world over. But, it's not entirely self-evident as to what exactly is it about the Queen we are supposed to respect. Is it for bringing up a family of no-marks with an army of nannies and servants?

The only reason I can see for why we should even bother to endow the Queen with our respects, is soley by the 'Grace of God', she was born with the name Mountbatten-Windsor, or, alternatively, it could be for the fact the Queen has never had to use the loo during any of her public engagements. Either way, to me, this is one of the most ojectionable features of Her Majesty - the culture of deference.

Forget about all that idol political chit-chat about British 'citizens', or who remembers John Major, and his nonsense about making Britain a 'classless' society? But, all it takes is one quick look at the Queen for me to know that Britain can't be 'classless', if anything, Britain is nothing but a class ridden society, through and through.

Whatever happened to the project of constructing a meritocratic, classless society? Ring-kissing, brown-nosed, bending of the knee subservience to the Queen, and the wider hierarchical social order must of killed it off.

Cameron, stop picking on black music! You get me?

2006-06-11T12:38:00.000+01:00

Here we go again, yet another white man having-a-go at black music, and, this seems to be the obvious main problem with David Camerons latest utterings. Cameron went out of his way to single out Radio 1's hip-hop dj Tim Westwood, and accused him of playing the kind of music that 'encourages people to carry guns and knives'

Reggae artist Doctah X, the co-founder of the Black Music Council, put it best while defending reggae music against Peter Tachell censorious interference "We've had enough, you get me?", I agree. For years I've been told that reggae dancehall music, jungle music, hip-hop music (black music in general) has some imaginary power that turns it's audience into some sort of pogrom. Apparently, no sooner than we hear the lyrics of Beenie Man, or the Wu-Tang Clan, we have this unstoppable urge to put a knife in our pockets and cause the most amount of trouble.

The underlying assumption of Cameron's notion seems to be that the people who do listen to dancehall reggae, or hard core hip-hop are so ignorant that just might go out and get themselves a gun or a knife. Firstly, I'd like to know what business is it of Cameron to dictate to Radio 1 about what they should or shouldn't play - and, secondly, why is he picking on black music alone? Would he prefer if black music artists dressed up in monster outfits and sang about Satanism instead? Cameron would like to be percieved as some sort of 'radical', but he reminds me more of the Mary Whitehouse blue-rinse school of politics - just like that the old-fashioned censor, who tried to get Frankie Goes to Hollywood banned all because she thought the lyrical content could turn nice striaght boys into raving queers.

Cameron doesn't seem to care very much about the notion of freedom either - he needs reminding that real freedom is supposed to means putting up with music that we don't even particularly like.

An 'ethical' American militarism?

2006-06-02T23:40:00.000+01:00

The US military have just anounced that troops based in Iraq are to receive 30 days of 'ethical training'. Apparently, troops are to be given lessons in 'core warrior values', (whatever that is), in what seems like a desperate, knee-jerk reaction to the alleged slaughter of 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq.

The US military have been put on the defensive, top brass like Lt-Gen Peter Chiarelli, commander of multinational forces in Iraq admitted that 'it is important that we take time to reflect on the values that separate us from our enemies'. It looks as though American forces have fallen foul of their own propaganda. US forces have constantly made an emphasis of avoiding unnecessary civilian casualties, so when they do occur, they become a cause of an international outcry. Instead of pointing out that 'collateral damage', as it is euphemistically known as, is an inevitable consequence of war - the US military tries to play the victim, by accusing the insurgents of 'war crimes'. Accusing others of war crimes, only leaves the US military open to the very same accusation.

Picture: US military checkpoint in Bagdad. May 2006. (AFP/US ARMY/File/Staff Sgt Russel Lee Klika)

OBE's, the award for 'toilet cleaners'

2006-06-01T02:32:00.000+01:00

When I first read that the millionaire film-maker Michael Winner, turned down an OBE, I first thought, hello, never had Winner down as a republican, what's all that about? Only, later to discover the real reason he'd snubbed his nose up at an OBE was because he really did considered himself to be a real toff, and that OBE's were only fit for the likes of 'toilet cleaners'. It seemed for a minute that we were both on the same side, but we're not.

I can honestly say, without a shadow of doubt, that I would have to be dead before I knelt down on one knee, and kissed the hand of Her Majesty. Winner would have done it for a knighthood, he would have got down on his knee faster than you could say 'brown-nose'. To me, the hounors system, the Monarchy, and the House of Lords represents everything that is wrong in British society. Together, they represent what the revolutionary Tom Paine once referred to as 'the remains of aristocratical tyranny'. Over 200 years later, that tyranny is still a forceful kick in the teeth to the idea of a popular and meritocratic democracy. I think Winner did do the right thing when he turned down the OBE, but I also believe he did it for all the wrong reasons too.

UK summer heatwave warning? Chill out

2006-06-01T00:01:00.000+01:00

I think it's rather ironic that, 1) the British government has launched it's summer's 'Heatwave Plan 2006', at the tail end of, according to the Mirror newspaper, the wettest May we've seen in a decade - and, 2) that the government now describes the life giving properties of the sun, (aka sunshine), as though it were a severe mortal threat to us all.

The foreword of Heatwave plan for England: 'protecting health and reducing harm from extreme heat and heatwave' written by that well known climatologist, the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson said, 'Climate change means heatwaves are likely to become more common in England' - the heatwave Sir Donaldson had in mind was the one that hit Europe in the summer of 2003. Donaldson reminds us that the 2003 heatwave saw some 15,000 excess deaths due to 'heat-related conditions'.

In the past, annual government health warnings about the sun meant scaring us witless about the dangers of sunbathing by raising the spectra of cancer, even though melanoma victims in the UK still, thankfully remain rare. Today, the authorities public health promotions are more to do with promoting awareness about what they deem to be the 'right' issue. So, out goes the simplistic medical link between too much sunlight and the risk of skin cancer, in comes environmentalist concerns about the dangers of a summer heatwave.

Sir Donaldson is adamant that the heatwave plan for England is needed, even though the risk of a severe heatwave in Britain is less than 0.1%. He points to the 15,000 excess deaths in France 2003, and talks about the hypothetical problem's relating to climate change as proof that we need this plan. If that's his proof then we don't need their heatwave plan. Indeed, it could be argued that it was French environmentalist policies of 2001 that led to some 15,000 deaths in the summer of 2003. The chain of causes and its effects might seem difficult to grasp. Difficult, but not impossible

The heatwave that hit Europe in the late summer of 2003 did in fact kill thousands of people (mainly the elderly), and livestock. It also caused huge forest fires. It was more severe in France, due to the fact that the temperature did not drop during the evening, according to experts.

However, the hot, baking sun cannot explain the mass deaths in a modern Western society. When at the same time, across the Atlantic, temperatures reached over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in 2003. But that did not lead to thousands of people being killed. Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels on American Fox News pointed out the 'temperature in Paris was the same as in Denver, Chicago and Detroit'. But there were no deaths due to the baking heat in American cities, so what is going on in France?

The truth is, air conditioning is commonplace in American homes, however, in the technological sophisticated country like France, air conditioning is rare. Why is that?

European environmentalists have put so much pressure on governments to reduce energy consumption, that governments in Europe, especially France, have imposed huge energy taxes in order to reduce energy consumption. French consumers now pay on average 25 percent more for their energy than they do in the United States, and the average income is also low, which make electricity even more expensive in France.

So, high-energy taxes have done exactly what the environmentalists wanted it to do, reduce energy consumption. Air conditioners use more energy than any other household appliance, so in order to cut down their electric bills, the poor and elderly simply gave up using their air conditioners because it became too expensive to use. What is universal in America is in fact, the indulgence of the well off in France. The director of the Saint-Antoine in Paris, Chantal de Singly noted in Le Monde (Aug 19, 2003) that the French had two types of citizens 'the France of the air conditioners versus the France of the overheated'.

So, there you have it - in order to address a hypothetical risk of global warming (of a few measly degrees), the French environmentalists high energy tax made it impossible for it's poorer citizens to protect themselves from what was, something that was foreseeable and preventable - a summer heatwave.

So, if the government are really so concerned about the elderly and vulnerable during a summer heatwave, why don't they just make air-conditioners universal in Britain? But that would contradict the governments newfound environmentalist concerns. The truth is, it's not the sun that is the threat to us all in the summer, it's taking warning advice from a government who mistakenly think they Know What's Best.

Picture: The Sun.

Euston Manifesto & al-Qaeda, there's a connection

2006-05-31T14:07:00.000+01:00

I've just read a rather interesting article by one of my favourite writer's Brendan O'Neill, who argues (I think quite rightly) that the leaders of the Euston Manifesto actually have a lot more in common with the weirdy-beardies of al-Qaeda than they might think.

Your enemies enemies, not always your best allies

2006-05-31T11:12:00.002+01:00

I would call myself a Marxist, of the libertarian variety, who has long supported the Palestinians' right to self-determination. However, there seems to be nothing positive in today's discourse on the Middle East, and on Israel in particular.

These days, your enemies enemies are certainly not always your best allies. Contemporary criticism of Israel by the left reveals more about the un-critical outlook of the left than it does about any possible solution to the Palestinian question.

Talk of 'Nazis', 'ZioNazis' or 'Zionist SS' only belittles and relatives the real Third Reich that tore Europe apart in the last century. It also serves to divert attention away from what's really happening and fails to see any fundamental changes that are taking place. For example, it's very popular to condemn President G. W. Bush for being 'the most pro-Israeli President ever'. But my assessment is that it is quite surprising how far this right-wing Republican Administration has gone to accommodate Palestinian concerns. Washington, of course finances and arms Israel, but Bush is the first President to commit America to supporting a Palestinian state. Bush has endorsed the Israeli withdrawal plan.

If anything, the Israeli military machine is less trigger happy now than it was in the past. In the past Israel engaged in full scale invasions like Lebanon in 1982, where Palestinian refugees were massacred. Today, Israel is more likely to opt for 'targeted assassinations' of Palestinian leaders.

Even the wall that Israel is building is seen by some on the left as a 'new form of occupation', rather than seeing the Israeli fence as part of fundamental changes that are taking place in the mindset of the ruling elite. For the first time, Israel has put security above any broader territorial ambitions it once had. The wall has put into question the historic distinction between the revisionists of the Likud Party and Labour Zionists. Lukid is basically writing off its territorial claims through the act of making this wall. The wall also offers a powerful physical recognition, of Palestinian territory. This is why even hard-right wing Israelis have serious reservations about the proposed wall.

In the West, the left no longer openly support the Palestinians right to self-determination, mainly because they are too preoccupied with bashing Israel. The Israeli state has long been viewed as an outpost of Western civilisation that is surrounded by violent, hostile Arab Muslims - this was Israels' strength not so long ago, now, that very same quality has become Israels' liability. The Western left seem comfortable only with wars fought under the banner of multilateral humanitarianism, unlike Israels' insistence on defending it's national sovereignty. So, the more Israel fights, the more it's actions are viewed as totally unfashionable

Today, Israels' critics have nothing progressive, liberal or liberating to argue for, in fact, it says more about the uncritical and defeatist attitudes in the West than it does about achieving peace in the Middle East.

Picture: Palestinian protest. BBC News

The 'paralysing fatalism' of Greenpeace

2006-05-27T00:30:00.000+01:00

Last year the UN published it's scientific report into the accident at the nuclear facilities at Chernobyl. The 600 page report concluded that the people of Ukraine and the surrounding region have been affected by over-the-top, exaggerated fears rather than by radiation exposure. Indeed, the report argues that the people in the affected area have suffered a 'paralysing fatalism', due mostly to the 'myths and misperceptions' spun by environmentalists organisations throughout the West.

I'm not quite sure what's worse, 'paralysing fatalism', or death - in human terms, there pretty much the same. Eco-worriers like Blake Lee-Harwood from Greenpeace, told the BBC, that the nuclear industry had a 'vested interest in playing down Chernobyl because it's an embarrassment to them'. But, hold on a minute, Greenpeace also have a 'vested interest' in hyping-up Chernobyl. It stands to reason, if the world's worst nuclear disaster wasn't really all that, then there's no good reason why we can't build a new generation of nuclear power-stations over here.

But, Greenpeace couldn't have that, they hate anything to do with nuclear science, I don't know why they just don't come out and say it - at least it would show some honesty. Rather than the un-scientific opposition towards nuclear science which Greenpeace is basing their case on. Where is Greenpeace's evidence that 93,000 people will die as a result of Chernobyl?

The cry of 'vested interest' by Greenpeace, is, in fact, a sick joke. The idea that the Russian Federation, the government of Belarus and the Ukraine, the World Health Organisation, and various other UN agencies, are somehow in the pockets of the nuclear industry is risible. The truth is, it's Greenpeace who has the 'vested interest' in maintaining the 'paralysing fatalism' that surrounds the issue of Chernobyl and nuclear science.

Picture: Radiation reading from outside Chernobyl - AFP

Biggest threat to Africa is environmentalism

2006-05-26T11:15:00.000+01:00

Environmentalists current obsession with the hypothetical problems relating to climate change, threatens to marginalize and overlook more pressing problems for humanity in the here and now – like the fight against malaria in Africa and the rest of the Third World.

Environmentalists constantly bang on and on about forcing the most powerful leaders of the Western world to do this, that or the other, in order to ‘save us all from global warming’, but meanwhile in the real world, the body count for malaria in Africa alone is a million per year, and rising. (1) What makes me really angry is that these deaths need not have occurred. In fact, all those deaths lead right back to earlier environmentalists political obsessions – the banning of pesticides.

Malaria, extinct in the Western world for nearly thirty years, is alive and well and killing Africans by the millions. Yet, it seems as though environmentalists couldn't care less about fighting real killers of Africans, like malaria, it doesn't really fit into their ecological agenda. But don't take my word for it, go and ask any wannabe eco-warrior what's more important for Africa 'the fight against malaria' or 'climate change'? The chances are, they wouldn't even bother to answer such a question. It's as if they don't know what the difference is between a real threat to life in the here and now, and a percieved hypothetical threat of the far distant future.

Meanwhile, in the West, we’ve had the pleasure of using the miraculous life-saving pesticide known as DDT, which has all but eradicated malaria from the advanced world. Then came the World Wildlife Fund and the rest of the Green Gang calling for a worldwide ban on the use of DDT. They got their ban, now surprise, surprise, malaria; a once nearly defeated disease is killing more people globally than ever. But who would ever relate environmentalist anti-DDT policy with millions of malaria related deaths and illnesses?

For all their talk about the dire urgency of spending billions, upon billions of pounds reducing carbon emissions in order to ‘stabilise the climate’ by one or two measly degrees, it seems as though the life of Africans, is in fact far, far less important than advancing the politics of their latest green obsession – climate change, like nothing else matters anymore.

Read on:

(1) WHO: Malaria is alive and well and killing more than 3000 African children every day. 2003

Picture: Malaria victim from sub-Saharan Africa. (Cris Bouroncle / AFP-Getty Images)

Israel: it's about time we boycotted boycotts

2006-05-25T10:39:00.000+01:00

The German sociologist August Bebel once coined the phrase the 'socialism of fools', it was aimed at academics and radical activists who tried to put a positive spin on their anti-Semitic politics. Ok, I admit that the likes of Jacqueline Rose is not your traditional, old school anti-Semite, but her tendency to promote undemocratic and other highly dubious ideas like academic boycotts of Israel, all in the name of ‘solidarity’ for the Palestinian people looks, in mine eye, just as foolish.

If you ask me, the Middle East has seen enough Western meddling in its internal affairs. It has been nearly 200 years of Western intervention that has turned that area of the globe into the bloody mess that it is today. And here it is again, Rose, an academic Western do-gooder, demanding boycotts, sanctions and other such interferences for the sake of the Palestinians. These demands will not help the plight of the Palestinian peoples, nor will it bring peace and stability to the region, but it will surely pave the way for more intrusive Western intervention in the area, for the foreseeable future.

To me, in the first place, radical politics should be about the defence of human and democratic rights. Today however, Rose’s form of primitive radicalism seeks to condone Western imperialist interventions, whether it be economic or military sanctions or academic and cultural boycotts,– either way, Rose invites more foreign interference in the region.

Besides, Rose's solution to the problems of Israel and Palestine are non-starters. She has no progressive alternative for the Middle East. All Rose has is an over inflated sense of self-indulgence; she demonstrates perfectly the West'’s current obsession with the culture of victimhood. Surely, if Israel was as terrible as Rose makes out, and if Palestinians are the 'victims of victims’ and the ‘new Jews’, why does she not go to the West Bank and lie in the path of an Israeli tank? Of course, that is not the type of 'mess' that Rose had in mind. If she did that, I would have some respect for her, because there cannot be any reason to endorse the politics of highbrow primitivism, or as Bebel put it 'the socialism of fools'. The people of Palestine deserve much, much better.

Brazilian police: real experts in lethal violence

2006-05-24T21:14:00.000+01:00

It's been six days since rioting broke out in Brazilian cities, some put the death toll at over 150. The BBC also reports that the Brazilian police have been 'heavily criticised' by human rights organisations for killing over '109 suspects' within a week. The Brazilian authorities are trying very hard to play down the high death toll by stating that they had only shot and killed '79 suspects' this week.

A spokesman for the National Movement for Human Rights, Ariel de Castro Alves, told the BBC that anywhere up to 'a third of those killed by the police appeared to have been innocent civilians'. Amnesty International (AI), is also extremely worried about the lethal tactics used by the Brazilian police. AI even highlighted in their 2005 report on Brazil, that 'ineffective, violent, and corrupt policing', as well as police 'death squads', threatened the Brazilian governments proposals for reform.

All this talk of arbitrary, lethal violence from the Brazilian police, in one week, reminds me of the killing of Charles de Menezes back in July 2005. Few will remember the Brazilian police and authorities, coming over to Britain last year, to start a three day grilling session of the Metropolitan Police, about the tragic accidental killing of Menezes. Even then, I wanted to know what right the Brazilian state had to humiliate the MET about ‘shoot to kill’ policies in London? Who are they to talk about the fallibility of the use of shoot to kill? What about the 79 people the Brazilian police said they killed, just in this week alone? Indeed, what about the 'slaying' of 30 men, women and children allegedly gunned down by Brazilian policemen in Rio de Janeiro only last year?

The killing of Menezes was, indeed, an appalling accident - no more, no less. However, there is a huge, huge difference between the MET and the Brazilian police force, as graphically depicted by events in Brazil this week – even historically speaking, trigger-happy policemen have not been terribly hard to find in Brazil.

Picture: Brazilian Police in Rio. BBC News

If it's so hard being green, why bother?

2006-05-23T13:48:00.000+01:00

The other day I watched a TV show by the BBC 2 called 'It's Not Easy Being Green'. The show tracks the progress of the Strawbridge family (above) and their desire (or obsession) to reduce their ecological 'footprint', in a muddy field, somewhere in Cornwall. In this particular show, the Strawbridge family were getting ready for their 'ecological audit'. Dick Strawbridge, who narrates the show, and sports a ridiculous moustache, is optimistic that their 'sustainable' home will pass the 'ecological audit' with flying colours.

To tell you the truth, after seeing what they spent their £100,000 on, in their home, I thought they would do exceedingly well too. To my surprise, the 'ecological auditor' brought the families home to task on a variety of issues. At one point, the auditor only gave the family '5 out of 10' for fixing a basic generator and for installing an 'eco central heating system'. The Strawbridge families back-breaking hard work was only getting them 5 out 10 points, or 6 out of 10 - and, did it seem worth all that trouble - I think not.

Just like the BBC comedy show The Good Life, it's become very fashionable for the middle-classes to be self-sufficient, whether their in the leafy south London suburb of Surbiton, or in a muddy field in Cornwall - they, like most environmentalists are obsessed about consumer consumption. They hate the 'David Beckhams' of this world, who are quite happy spending their way into the future (and good-luck to them), rather than being like the Strawbridge family who are obsessed with making sure that their 'ecological footprint' is as small as humanly possible. If it's so hard to be green, it makes you wonder if it's even worth being green in the first place - I say why bother?

Picture: The Strawbridge Family. BBC Programmes

Jamie Oliver: he's just an overpaid cook

2006-05-23T12:12:00.000+01:00

Am I the only person who feels absolutely sick to the bottom of my stomach every-time that millionaire chef Jamie Oliver appears on TV or radio talking serious politics? Sainsbury's very own 'chav' poster boy is certainly making a big impression on the British cultural and political scene. Armed to the teeth with nothing more than an battalion of dinner-ladies and raw spinach, Oliver plans on taking the authorities to task not over the Iraq war, but over an issue that is far, far more important... the fat content in school dinners.

Were it not for the local council elections, Oliver's school dinner campaign would probably still be top of the political agenda. Oliver's political crusade is a good example of how strong emotions and feeling are now considered more important than hard evidence, or even a coherent argument. Oliver's so called 'revolution' has all the right ingredients, namely... children, and our political elites have been falling over themselves to get their little slice of the action. Now all of a sudden everybodys so concerned about what our school kids eat for lunch.

All in all, it's a very sad state of political affairs when a trumped-up, overpaid cook can rise to the top of political debate, all because school dinners, well... don't taste very nice. Even his criticism of school meals being detrimental to the education and health of our kids is way off the factual mark. There is no evidence that eating raw spinach will make kids concentrate more on their school work than if they ate a turkey twizzler. But why let cold facts like that get in the way of a rolling bandwagon?

One of the worst aspects of all of this, is that an unashamed publicity-seeking chef, with an over-blown sense of self-importance thinks he is more representative of the people than an elected politician. Oliver and others, also seem to think that getting the government to add a few measly pence on to the cost of a school meal amounts to the biggest food revolution that England has ever seen. Well, if you ask me, this is the kind of revolution that I find near impossible to swallow.

Read on:

Jamie Oliver website.

Picture: Jamie Oliver after winning two BAFTAs (Gareth Davies/Getty Images)

Kyoto Protocol: trading dollars for pennies is immoral

2006-05-22T15:00:00.000+01:00

Back in 1997, the Oxford economist Wilfred Berkerman, author of 'Small is Stupid' asked 'why should one impose a much higher burden on present generations in order to reduce carbon concentrations significantly' for a future generation that will be far richer than us in any case? (1)

I thinks it's completely immoral to ask developing (and developed) nations, in particular, India and China, to distribute their wealth, for the next 100 years, to a future generation that will be far, far richer than we are today. Furthermore, not only is the Kyoto Protocol morally bankrupt, the economic analysis of the costs of implementing Kyoto, seem highly dubious as well.

OpenDemocracy's very own eco-worrier, Caspar Henderson, is adimant that the Protocol will only cost some '£10 billion', and not the '$4 trillion' which I quoted previously on openDemocracy. The figure I quoted came from Dr Sallie Baliunas, who is the senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. According to Baliunas, in order to meet the criteria laid down by Kyoto, the US would have 'no choice but to cut energy use'.

Baliunas argues, that by the year 2010, if the Protocol was implemented by American environmentalists standards, the United State's annual consumption of energy would be around 110 quads, 110 quadrillion BTUs of energy. (2) But, back in 1995, the US consumed nearly 90 quads per year. (3) By 2003, that went up to 98.1 quads per year. (4)

So, in order to meet the 2010 bar of 110 quads, America would have to reduce their energy consumption by some hefty 7 percent. The US would have to make do with a lot less energy. So energy cuts, coupled with the implementation of Kyoto, until 2010, will cost somewhere between $2 trillion and $4 trillion. (5)

The statistician Bjorn Lomborg, author of 'The Skepitical Environmentalist' argues that the worldwide cost of Kyoto would be in the region of $350 billion per year, by the start of 2010 - rising to a massive $900 billion per year by 2050. The American Department of Energy Information Administration calculate a much gloomier figure. They estimate that Kyoto will cost the US, alone about $300 billion per year - with a resulting loss of GDP, over ten years would be about 28 percent, triple the loss of GDP experienced by the US during the Great Depression, that was about 10 percent. The sum of money needed to implement Kyoto is truly enormous. All that money, for all that length of time, for what? So we can delay the predicted amount of warming by a measly 6 years? (6)

A lot of people think it's morally right to spend thousands of billions of dollars, over the next 100 years, in order to prevent global warming. But when you balance out the sheer costs to what benefits we would receive, the benefits just don't seem worth it. Kyoto is akin to handing over a dollar in order to receive a penny - and in mine eye, that's immoral.

Read on:

(1) Professor Wilfred Berkerman. The Millennium Environment Debate.

(2) Dr. Sallie Baliunas - Senior Astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

(3) Figures for BTU consumption from Ecoworld.com.

(4) American Department of Energy Information Administration Statistics.

(5) Dr. Sallie Baliunas.

(6) Global warming nonsense. An economic journal publishes junk. By Paul Georgia. National Review.

Picture: 'The Blue Marble' - From Visible Earth. NASA.

Saddam the tyrant, deserves a fair trial - at least

2006-05-22T13:52:00.000+01:00

There are many people it seems that would prefer Saddam Hussein to be shot, without, any of that messy business called justice thrown in the mix. There is no good reason as to why Saddam cannot have a fair trial, indeed, it's imperative that justice in this case is seen to be done, isn't it?

The right wing think tank, the Ayn Rand Institute are adamant that Saddam, shouldn't even have a trial, let alone a fair one. The institute bemoans the fact, that any trial of Saddam, would presume he is innocent to start with - well, isn't that the case for all trials in the west? If, Saddam is guilty of all the things that the institute says he's guilty of, wouldn't that come out in the trial? What are the Ayn Rand Institute scared of? The truth maybe?

The truth is, we shouldn't have anything to fear from a fair trial of Saddam, unless you've got something to hide that is.

Why won't the left support Pro-Test demo?

2006-05-18T19:26:00.000+01:00

Once upon a time in the West, the left used to pose themselves as champions of science, reason and progress - but, not anymore it would seem. Now it seems they actually prefer to runaway from such tough issues as animal research, some have flatly refused to be involved with anything that defends animal research, because, they argue that animal experiments is all about lining the pockets of big drug companies.

As Brendan O'Neill rightfully points out in his article for The Newstateman, the left's refusal to openly back the Pro-Test demonstrations in Oxford, is nothing but a first-class 'cop-out'.

Immigration: simple solution, open the door!

2006-05-18T18:25:00.000+01:00

I'm of the belief that it's not the business of a free and democratic state to enforce strict, draconian curbs on international immigration, but this seems to be the perverse direction the debate on immigration in Britain seems to be taking.

What I find disturbing in this debate is the fact that freedom is ok for money - but when it comes to people, freedom, in fact, means the complete opposite. The Sun newspaper put it bluntly last year with it's 'No Skills. No English. NO ENTRY' front page, (which, in my mind bares an uncanny resemblance to the 'No Blacks. No Dogs. No Irish', signs put on the front of many homes in 50's Britain).

We need more freedom, not less.
When it comes to freedom, the liberal European intelligentsia and political elites are committed to just about every single freedom there is - well, in theory. They are forever talking about 'upholding' the rules for free trade, they constantly want to 'expand' the free movement of capital, they always want to 'open-up' new markets. Indeed, they devise new rules that 'force open' new capital markets - and keep them open, especially during times of crisis.

Immigration Laws:
This really all amounts to the freedom of governments and states, awarding themselves the right to trample over basic human rights - such as the right to free movement across European boarders. No matter how you discuss this issue, the bottom line is whether or not human beings have the right to migrate to Europe or not.

Firstly, I want to get things straight here, Britain might be a small island, and Europe might be a really small corner of the planet - but that does not mean 'we're full up'. On the contrary, there's plenty of space for hundreds and thousands of people - in the UK alone. Contrary to popular belief we are not 'bursting at the seams'. In fact, people coming and going, as they see fit, does not constitute a real problem per se - people just think it's a problem, and it is this which is the problem.

In fact, the whole debate about immigrants and people flows says more about us as a society and our values, than it does about those who want to come here. It's ironic and sick that we live in a world obsessed with human rights and freedom, yet when it comes to the right of people to 'pass freely without let or hindrance', that right stops the very moment you hit these shores

People all over the world want to be free - they strive to free themselves from poverty or oppression. That is why they vote with their feet. Roger Donway in his essay 'The States of Freedom' argues that:

"We believe people want to be free: they strive and work to be free, and search out locations, governments, and situations where freedom reigns. Migration is the purest expression of individuals responding to differences in freedom, including economic freedom. We adopt a migration metric for economic freedom. If people are moving from one state to another, other things equal, we assert that this is a market-based response to differences in freedom. Ordinary people, voting with their feet, define freedom."

Donway writes for the ultra conservative think-tank: The Objectivist Centre, and was concerned with the internal migration within the US. But I think his view of freedom and migration is fair and universal, not just national. Indeed, it's a far more positive outlook than what passes for serious debate on immigration in Britain today.

Picture: Press Association. BBC News.

McDonalds: there's no such thing as 'junk food'

2006-05-17T16:40:00.000+01:00

Most of what I read and hear about McDonald's food is no more than junk propaganda. Why do the anti-McDonald's turn-outs hate McDonald's so much? Ok, some people don't think its food taste too great, but isn't that just a matter of... er, taste? Where is the evidence that McDonald's food is bad for you?

Well, I want to let you good readers into a not so well known scientific secret. There is actually, no such thing as 'junk food'. Professor Stanley Feldman of London University argues that 'junk food does not exist'. He says 'of course, some foods taste better or are more nutritious. But the idea that some contain nothing of value or are harmful is nonsense.'

It's not just Feldman who has reservations about the idea of 'junk food', Professor Vincent Marks of Surrey University argues that junk food is a contradiction in terms. The truth is, all foods are actually good for you. Marks argues that the only bad food we know of, is food that has gone... er, bad. He says that 'McDonald's is considered bad, simply because it is wrong for our current fashion.'

These two views must seem completly bizarre to the anti-McDonald's brigade, who bombard us with warnings about the 'dangers' of burgers, fizzy drinks, fast foods, salt, high fat, sugar, or anything else we consume on a daily basis.

Feldman and Marks are not employees of the fast food industries. Nor can I say they are the type of people who eat Big Mac's and fries on a regular basis. They just (like me) object to the rubbish and misinformation, propagated by the anti-McDonald's turn-outs.

I agree with Marks when he argues that the term 'junk food' is just an emotive and derogatory lable that means you don't approve. A lot of people think baked beans on toast is a form of junk food, even though it's ideal for antioxidants, fibre and so on.

The real truth of the matter is McDonald's serves up a decent square meal. Obviously, if you ate super size McDonald's, 3 times a day, for a month your health would slowly deteriorate - but come off it, that's not exactly a startling revelation, is it?

In fact, the anti-junk food lobby are the last socially accepted form of snobbery. Listen to the way they describe fast food - 'junk, unhealthy, fatty' - you can almost hear them passing moral judgement over those who do eat fast food. Anti-McDonald's protesters unconsciously mirror the snobbery of an earlier age. John Carey in his book 'The Intellectual and the Masses', tells of how writers like John Betjeman, George Orwell and TS Eliot bemoaned the coming of 'tinned food' because it represented the industrialised popular culture that they hated.

All I really want, is to hear the truth about the food we eat - not junk propaganda.

Picture: BBC News.

GM food? Oh, yes please

2006-05-17T13:24:00.000+01:00

The irrational, suspicious reaction to GM crops seems to know no natural limits. It's actually quite disturbing, because the criticisms directed towards GM crops reflects a hatred of the enlightenment proposition: that human reason will triumph over superstition, fear and ignorance.

I believe that nature is not good enough for humanity. We have developed more choice over how we live our lives - we no longer live at the mercy of nature. It has only been through developing a technological society, which has meant, we in the advanced West no longer suffer from starvation and hunger.

I have read a lot of superstitious nonsense and ignorance in regards to the nature of GM. One such nonsense is that GM is a new type of crop product. But GM is nothing of the sort. GM is not a product - it's a process. The last 300 years have seen humanity taking things from nature, like for example wild grass and bred it into wheat, barley, rye and oats. Charles Darwin called this process artifical selection, where artifical means human action. No more reliance on biological chance.

Irrational anti-GM activists have claimed that GM transgenes are unstable and will escape, only to end up contaminating the environment. Or that GM can cause cancer, or that GM transgenes can enter human cells or our gut bacteria. But there is no evidence that GM transgenes cause cancer, or that they are particularly unstable. The truth is, that GM transgenes are no more dangerous than any other DNA that enters bacterial or human cells. Indeed, tests have shown that GM transgenes don't even tend to survive once they've entered bacterial or human cells.

There is one thing I've aways notice about the critics of GM, is that they fail to produce evidence to substanciate their wild claims. They have a tendency of showing you articles, or other peoples opinions - but never any real hard evidence. I'm not even going to go into the benefits of GM technology - I'll wait to see what types of replys I get from this post. If anyone out there does have any evidence to dis-prove my claim - I would surely like to see it.

Picture: A pro-GM demonstration

Car congestion? Simple, build more roads!

2006-05-17T09:46:00.000+01:00

Ok... I'll hold my hand up, and admit I love cars and motoring. I passed my test when I was 21, my first car was a secondhand Nissan Stanza, I soon wrote that off on the central reservation in Park Lane. So, I decided to save up some money and buy a new car, a Peugeot 205 Ralle. Loved it - drove it all over the UK, and Europe.

Today, it seems that the attitude towards cars, their owners, roads and motoways, have changed drasticly over the past 20 years. If you ask me, the Mayor of London, Ken Livinstone perfectly encapsulates contemporary attitude towards cars "I hate cars. If I ever get any power again, I'll ban the lot". This seems to be the solution to car congestion on offer by everyone these days, from New Labour to the entire environmentalists movement - the message is simple enough, 'get out of your car', and get a push bike, or jump on the bus instead. Better still... walk. Yeah right... as if.

Driving in London can certainly be a total nightmare, especially at Bank holiday weekends. In fact, Bank holiday weekends are when the road systems in England actually grinds to a halt. But, what I want to know is, why can't the 5th wealthiest nation on Earth, build itself out of congestion? Why can't we build more roads? That's how you gid rid of congestion, the Westway in West London is proof - if I want to go to Hammersmith from From Old Street, I go on the Westway, and Edware, Paddington and Notting Hill completely dissapper.

The debate about car congestion is dominated by petty small-mindedness. Apparently, the people who gave the world the engineering marvel that is the Channel Tunnel, are somehow incapable of building the kind of brand new state-of-the-art fast road infrastructure that we desperately need. The mantra from the government is that, whatever happens, we can't just build our way out of the problem. What? I would consider that an insult to the British building and engineering industry. Given the resources, there isn't anything they can't build.

So, hold on a minute, why can't we build our way out of this problem? Isn't that how humanity has progressed from the caves to modern day civilisation? Along the ancient trading routes, upon the roads the Romans built, on the Victorian railways, and on modern motorway systems. Our political elite seem to be in a different gear than our ancestors - Tony Blair and co seem to be in reverse.

It's not entirely self-evident as to why the British government believes that the British people 'cannot simply build our way out of the problems we face'. In case we forget, the Transport Secretary Alistair Darling reminded everyone at a speech to the Institute of Public Policy last year - that - you guessed it, 'we cannot build our way out of the problem'. Alright, alright, message recieved.

But, hello? Can I ask - why is the politics of petty, small-minded, local green Nimbyism being placed, over and above the fundamental notion of providing universal provisions? The past fifty years have seen motorways improve the quality of our lives, and has given us all more freedom in the process. Indeed, it is no business of the government to persuade people out of their cars, especially when they have no viable, or even visible alternative to it.

The British government are so bereft of vision, leadership, and most importantly, ideas, they have resorted to taxing motorists out of existence - what a novelty.

The truth is, we need new, bold ideas and plans if we really want to get rid of congestion from our cities. Not government mumbo-jumbo about 'car-sharing' schemes, that simply ain't good enough. We need to seek new horizons, not the low horizons on offer by this penny-pinching bunch of political bean-counters.

Picture: From the Guardian Unlimited

Islamophobia? There's no such thing

2006-05-15T23:32:00.001+01:00

There’s something growing at a large pace in Britain these days, it’s the gap between the perceptions of what is happening, and what is actually happening - and this gap is in danger of being fully exploited by our political elites, and the leaders of Muslim organisations.

Nearly every day we are being told that Britain is caught in the grip of an ever-increasing anti-Muslim backlash. Many of the news reports on the subject have sourced their material from Muslim organisations. (1) What is really happening here is that people believe what they want to believe, rather than believing in what happens to be true.

The truth is Muslim leaders have exaggerated the threat of Islamophobia and the anti-Muslim backlash for their own political benefits, in order to strengthen their weak power base on the streets from east London to Bradford and Glasgow. Mainstream politicians are also keen to exploit the myth of Islamophobia, it’s a perfect opportunity for them to jump-up on their high moral horse and get the Muslim vote at the same time. The government aims to sooth the pain Muslims felt when New Labour betrayed them in Iraq by pledging to introduce new laws that will effectively ban religious hate speech. (2)

I’m not suggesting that harassment, ignorance or fear of Muslims and Islam do not exist. The problem is that the level of anti-Muslim abuse is being inflated strictly for narrow political ends. Islamophobia is fast becoming the shaping force behind what you can and can’t say about Islam. So the chance of being able to participate in a free, open and frank debate in the future looks extremely slim.

Islamophobia loses all sense of proportion in other ways, the minute you attach that label to someone. Two years ago, the racist Nick Griffin of the BNP was voted ‘Islamophobe of the Year’ at an award ceremony organised by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, that's fair enough – but so too was the liberal, anti-racist Polly Toynbee. As far as I’m concerned Toynbee is a secularist who has long campaigned for women’s rights, and is a critic of Islam. How can you compare her with a British neo-fascist? The truth is the IHRC is incapable of distinguishing between the two.

I might normally laugh at such awards were it not for the fact that the IHRC is no small concern. It does consultation work for the UN, and it’s verbally backed by Trevor Phillips and the CRE, and that’s not funny.

Read:

(1) Anti-Muslim backlash intensifies. IRR news. 2005
http://www.irr.org.uk/2005/july/ha000017.html

(2) Pledge to wipe out Islamophobia. BBC news. 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1570106.stm

Illustration: BBC News 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3328277.stm

The Kyoto Protocol is dead, let it rest in peace

2006-05-15T01:20:00.000+01:00

People coming out on the streets, celebrating the first anniversary of the enforcement of the Kyoto Protocol were conspicuous by their absence this year. Admittedly, the few that did bother, had nothing to celebrate. A year earlier, the British Prime Minister, on the same week the Protocol came into force, went ahead and allowed British industry to pollute 20 million tonnes more than the limit approved by the European Union executive.

Blair has spent the past few years paying lip service to the protocol, so when it came to putting his money where his mouth is - he backed out a year later. The Protocol, in reality, is in tatters. None of the main players America, Australia, China, Brazil and India want to impose what they called 'binding restrictions' on their emissions of greenhouse gases.

If anything, Blair has come to the realisation that the economics of the Kyoto Protocol - just don't add up. On the left, openDemoracy's Casper Henderson seems to bemoan the fact that critics of the Protocol argue (rightfully) that it will 'hamper economic growth'. 'Hamper' is putting it politely, to say the least. If you replace the word hamper with hammer, you will have a more precise term to discribe the economic effects of the Protocol on developed, and developing economies.

What Henderson refers to as 'hamper', the American National Center For Policy Analysis (NCPA) calls it 'devastating damage'. The NCPA argues that countries that comply with the Protocol stand to lose some 5 percent of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It will increase unemployment by one million in Britain, and 1.8 million in Germany. America stand to lose some 5 million jobs if they complied to the Protocol.

The NCPA added that European nation would fare badly because they would be hit twice by, rising unemployment and a sharp rise in fuel bills, that would raise the price of heating, petrol, diesel and electricity by 10 percent initially - but, by 2010, the price of fuel will rise to some 20 percent. The damage this will do to European economies will no doubt effect us all. Spain, with it's heavy reliance on trucking, is set to be the biggest loser in Europe.

Environmentalists the world over have put the Kyoto Protocol on a morally high, political pedestal. But one by one, EU leaders are slowly waking up to the economic realities of the Protocol - it's only a matter of time before they all give up on this ecological-pantomime.

I want governments to spend more time, and money, encouraging rapid economic development, which would puts our society in a better position to adapt to climate change in the future. Why put the jobs of millions of people on the line? The sheer size of the effort and money needed, just to comply with the Protocol warrants serious interrogation, into what will be the outcome of all this? What will be the net effects of all this societal sacrifice? Even if all nations complied until 2012, the cumilative effects on the emission of greenhouse gases would still be how the NCPA put it - 'negligible'.

Kyoto is said to be the most 'groundbreaking global treaty' ever known. It's also said that the Protocols accords, amount to the 'world's most ambitious and complex environmental treaty' the world has ever seen. If you ask me, European leaders should get together so they could discuss how they should totally ditch Kyoto, and concentrate time, effort and (more importantly) money, on improving the lack of dynamism in their own economies. With China and India, out of the Kyoto 'straight-jacket', and most of the developing countries are exempt from the treaty, this will mean that Europe would have to shoulder a very serious economic burden, from now until 2012 - and that's just the start.

Read: Kyoto and the politics of climate change.
By Caspar Henderson
http://opendemocracy.typepad.com/wsf/

Reality and Climate Change Policy.
By the National Center For Policy Analysis.
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba367/

Economic Effects of Kyoto on Europe.
By the National Center For Policy Analysis.
http://www.ncpa.org/iss/env/2002/pd042502g.html

Quitting Kyoto.
By Philip Scott
http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/00000006D967.htm

Blair angers the green lobby by defying Brussels on emissions.
The Scotsman.
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=172282005

Picture: View of Earth from the Apollo 13 mission. From the Project Apollo Archive.
http://www.apolloarchive.com/apollo_archive.html

Anti-nuclear politics is backward at the best of times

2006-05-13T03:22:00.000+01:00

I take it totally for granted that I have a constant supply of energy. So why is it that everybody keeps constantly reminding me that I can’t take it for granted anymore?

How can it be, in a technologically advanced country like Britain, that energy can become a debatable subject? What’s wrong with Western nuclear power? It’s the safest form of energy production that mankind has conceived. Why do environmentalists hate our nuclear age and prefer to go backwards to the age of wind power, or worse? Why should I care where my energy comes from that powers my laptop?

As for future energy needs for the year 2050 and beyond, why not look to solar energy, beamed down by high voltage solar powered satellites, 7 days a week, in any weather? You would also need nuclear fusion to generate that power along superconducting cables. (1) This would render the idea of our societies having an ‘energy crisis’ redundant, but I fear there would be too much environmentalist hostility towards such a bold development, because now we have to constantly think about how we can get to work without damaging the eco-system, or without risking a persons health– or worse, running out of energy altogether, and so on, and on. But why?

Contrary to popular belief we are not running out energy, and when we need energy, we get it. I will admit that a very serious discussion needs to take place about the future of where we get our energy. The way I understand it, energy as a resource seems, generally to be a rather technical problem – but now, it’s a political problem. Some would have us believe it’s some type of war, and that oil addicted ‘vested interests’ lay behind all the political problems associated with energy. (2)

If only it was that simple. The main problems I see when it comes to the future of energy, is not redneck oil barons, but the current irrational opposition to nuclear power. Everybody seems to hates nuclear power, there are few defenders - worst still; the government rolls over and entertains the publics’ fears and prejudices. Environmentalists’ everlasting preoccupation with climate change and greenhouse emissions threatens our society by putting us on a prolonged crisis mentality footing. The out come of all of this is a paralysing effect that cuts off any fruitful avenues that we might wish to go down.

As openDemoracy's Casper Henderson observes, ‘the nuclear industry and its allies in many countries have for some time used the need to reduce emissions as a central plank in their argument for more nuclear power’. (3) But only as an option – not as a rational long term solution. Indeed, Sir David King, the governments chief scientific adviser made this explicit when he said the new generation of existing fission technologies should be an ‘option’. (4)

Politician certainly believe they can talk about the desirability of nuclear power in polite company at dinner parties these days, but it’s only as an option, it’s not presented as a science and technology that could hugely contribute to social progress. The advancement of nuclear technology in the UK has become prematurely restricted.

The problem is not Western nuclear energy and it’s economics, the problem is our overly risk-averse and precautionary times we live in. Anti-nuclear (and anti-radiation) critics are driven by a profound fear of accidents. This fear is irrational and paralyzing, and it leads to over-regulation in the nuclear energy sector, and through that exceptional costs.

The result of this anit-nuclear politics, has meant that nuclear energy has not had the opportunity to gain the full benefits of operating experience or economies of scale and standardization. Even though the Royal Academy of Engineering argued in their report that future nuclear energy still remains the most ‘competitive’ form of electricity production to date. (5) Criticism of nuclear waste for example highlights how the politics of risk-aversion and precaution actually ends up holding society back. Environmentalists current obsession with the imaginary and symbolic risk surrounding nuclear waste has meant that the simple task of dumping nuclear waste, has become a costly issue, and expense - that knows no limit.

The last nuclear power station built in the UK was Sizewell B, and that construction only started in 1987, after years of regulatory wrangling and Britain’s longest public inquiry. It’s not the economics that puts off the private nuclear energy sector, it’s the governments overbearing precautionary regulations that are a powerful disincentives to energy companies.

Ultimately, and thankfully, we will have a nuclear powered future. The nuclear programme will go ahead, whether ecologists like it or not, and so what if they don’t like it. Nuclear power already provides some 20 percent of Britain’s electricity and it needs to provide much more in the future. But if the environmentalist movement continue their fight, and have their way, we can all look forwards to going backwards to the age of wind power - something, we stopped doing over 100 years ago. (6)

Read on:

(1) NASA: House Science Committee Hearings on Solar Power Satellites. 2000
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=2568

(2) Energy wars and the future of planet earth – Part 1, 2 & 3. By Casper Henderson. 2003.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/themes/article.jsp?articleId=873&id=6

http://www.opendemocracy.net/themes/article-6-900.jsp

http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-6-32-924.jsp

(3) Re: The obsession with emissions. A reply by C. Henderson. 2005.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/forums/thread.jspa?forumID=179&threadID=44230&tstart=0

(4) Global warming won't save nuclear power. By Joe Kaplinsky. 2005.
http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA987.htm

(5) The Cost of Generating Electricity. The Royal Academy of Engineering. 2004.
http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/publications/list/reports/Cost_Generation_Commentary.pdf

(6) Welcome to the Age of Wind. The future of energy: By Jennie Bristow. 2002
http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000002D450.htm

Picture: The Sellafield Golf Ball, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/06/business_sellafield0s_future/html/5.stm

Animals don't have rights, stupid

2006-05-12T10:54:00.000+01:00

Animals cannot, and should not have any rights whatsoever, and that is a good thing to. The whole concept of ‘animal rights’ is a pathetic fallacy perpetrated by groups and individuals who have an overblown sense of kindness towards animals. In fact, animals that exist in society are the property of humans, which is why they do not deserve to have legal status. Imagine if animals did have legal status – all hunters whether in the Amazonian jungle or the Scottish highland could be charged with murder, a road kill would be a ‘hit and run’, or worst, manslaughter, pet ownership would be viewed as an illegal slave-market.

Humanities rational reasoning has conceived of what we know today as the concept of rights, for itself – not for any other living entity. The notion of rights is a moral concept that humanity needs in order to live our lives the way we see fit. Indeed, it is humanities right to use animals like any other resource around us – we have the right to eat animals for food, we have the right to kill certain animals for clothing, we have the right to experiment on animals, and yes, we have the right to use animals for our entertainment if need be.

Proponents of rights for animals say they want to put a halt to the sadistic treatment of animals by torturers (aka scientists), but the truth is the aim of animal-rights activists is to sacrifice and subjugate humanity to the level of animals. This is the logical conclusion of the idea of animal rights. You cannot attribute rights to dumb animals that are amoral and nonrational – to do that would turn rights from an important tool that preserves humanity to a tool that would liquidate humanity.

It comes as no surprise that some animal rights activists turn to terrorism to pursue their aims of destroying humanity, from digging up dead bodies to the attempted murders of scientists and lab technicians (including their families). Locking up the lunatic fringe of the animal-rights movement is not enough – what is needed is a new war against the very notion of ‘animal rights’. It needs to be confronted by a principled and intellectual war that will condemn ‘animal rights’ for what it is – logically false and morally, deeply repugnant.

Picture: V. I. Lenin in Gorky. Sept 1922. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/photo/1922/036.htm

The BNP: is Britain really turning fascist?

2006-05-12T03:51:00.000+01:00

New Labour and it's supporters seem to be under the impression that the spectra of fascism is haunting Britain today. The way the employment minister Margaret Hodge spoke about the white working-class in east London, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the Capital is currently over-run by thousands of swastika tatooed 'chavs' - who would like nothing better than to cause a major stink by voting for an extreme racist party. Note 'thousands' as opposed to 'millions', because, as far as I know, most people can't even be arsed to vote in Local elections anymore, let alone vote for the BNP. Indeed, Hodge's very own constituency of Barking has some of the lowest turnouts for voting in the UK.

So what was the point about hyping up the political 'threat' from the BNP? Since when has the BNP posed a significant challenge to the three main parties at the polls? More importantly, what kind of political strategy over exaggerates the strength of thier opponents? Well, it's certainly not the sort of stratergy that forged an empire, or fought two global wars, the kind of stratergy that has made this country what it is today, one of the best on earth.

The way Hodges spoke about the white working-class in east London, you'd think ordinary people from that area never had an honorable tradition of anti-racism - ever.

Hello there employment minister, but, where did you get that figure '8 out of 10' tempted to vote BNP from? That's totally ridiculous. It's as if the minister needs reminding that nobody even bothers to vote in Local elections, especially in Barking, and especially for her.

The truth is, due to all this free publicity, headed by Hodge, and backed up statistically by heavyweight institutions like the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, will mean that the BNP's share of the measley vote will go up a notch or two.

And what about those people who do vote for the BNP? Are we supposed to believe that the white working-class who vote BNP in Barking are really just closet Hitlerites? No, I certainly don't think so - those people are former hardcore Labour voters, for years. New Labour can no longer convince it's own traditional constituency to turnout and vote for it anymore.

New Labour have been reduced to frightening people out of their wits as a good reason to vote for them, by blowing the BNP up out of all proportions. The New Labour project is dead, they are politically exhausted, they have no more ideas left, and financially their bankrupt. So pointing at the BNP, makes Hodge appear as one of the good-guys, as opposed to those evil monsters over there.

As for the BNP, as some have rightfully noted, you couldn't buy publicity like this even if they paid for it.

6 billion reasons for cheering

2006-05-11T23:56:00.000+01:00

I was once asked, why do I oppose world population reduction?

I oppose world population reduction for two reasons; 1) the idea is based upon a fundamentally flawed proposition, and 2) inherent in the idea of 'population reduction' is the politics and ideology of anti-humanism. This is the logical conclusion of anti-humanist thought. A brand of thought that percieves the entire human race to be nothing more than algae spreading across the pond that is Earth.

Vivisection? Yes please

2006-05-11T18:30:00.000+01:00

When it comes to scientific progress, and animal research in particular, I think it's entirely moral and humane to slice open the skin of animals, and stick hypodermic neddles in them, or to cut their skulls open to place electrodes on their brains. Or to test out new life-saving drugs on them - indeed, I think this is absolutely necessary and proper in order to find cures for such horrible diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's or Huntington's.

I know a lot of people will read this and say 'my word, what a sick and sad person I am', but, the people I find really sick, are those who stand opposed to scientific animal research for the betterment of humanity.

When it comes to debating animal research in Britain, it's been the sicko's from the organisation SPEAK who have made all the running and made the most noise. The super sicko's of the Animal Liberation Front have gone further, and declared all staff and students at Oxford University to be 'legitimate targets'. Now, if that's not the declaration of a sicko organisation - I don't know what is.

Sudan: just say 'NO' to military intervention

2006-05-11T14:06:00.000+01:00

The British media, political commentators and armchair liberals have suspended critical thinking on Sudan over the past few years. Pundits of all persusions cheered George Clooney's recent visit to Sudan, demanding that the Sudanese government take action in response to the atrocities in Darfur. Those who once opposed western military adventures in Iraq (twice), now seem to have turned completely brown-nosed when it comes to Sudan.

'Diplomacy and promises are not enough' argue Oxfam. Everyone from the left to the right have demanded stronger intervention in Sudan. From the civil rights campaigner Jesse Jackson to the right-wing Daily Telegraph, everyone seem to be proposing that 'there can be no clearer case for humanitarian intervention'.

Even though Britain and the US stands in utter disgrace over Iraq, in Sudan, the Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush can look good when they lay down the law to the Sudanese government. But Blair and Bush's interest in Khartoum is motivated by domestic concerns. The two leaders motives in Sudan are deserving of intense interrogation, just like the dodgy intelligence their government spun to justify the war in Iraq. New Labour, the Bush administration, and what I'd call, liberal imperialists are constantly on the lookout for human disasters in far-off lands in order to show what the West is for, or against. It's as though the West is on a mission to rediscover itself in Sudan. For our political elites, the conflict in Darfur is used soley to endow themselves with a new sense of moral purpose 'over-there'.

Indeed, there is a tragic crisis in Sudan, but western proposals about military intervention will not help to alleviate that crisis. The Sudanese will not benifit whatsoever from any of the West's fact-finding missions to the Darfur region. Also, what can deploying thousands of troops do? Deploying western, or foriegn troops in Darfur is nothing more than a political gesture, it's certainly not a practical measure that the Sudanese will benefit from.

In any case, Sudan has been a hell-hole for the past 50 years, the end of the Cold War has made the country even more unstable. So what on earth makes Blair, Bush and co think that they have a solution to the problems facing Sudan? Darfur has only become a issue for warmongerers like Blair and Bush since 2004. Could it be that they are seeking an easy intervention? An intervention that has no WMD's to worry about? The Gulf War Part 2 has been an unmitigating political nightmare. Britain and America's hunger to intervene in Sudan is surley shaped more by the fallout from Iraq than by recent events on the ground in Darfur.

Besides', why would Western intervention improve things for the Sudanese? From Sierra Leone to Somalia, out-side interference, in the post Cold-War era has made matters worse for those on the receiving end, not better. It was Britain who carved up eastern Africa and imposed an iron-fist colonial rule on it. Sudan was ruled by Britain and Egypt until 1956.

The West's sudden interest has nothing to do with Sudan per se. The motivation for intervention is homegrown. Look how easy it is to re-establish a sense of certainty about what's right and wrong in far-off places, much easier than addressing difficult and complex crisis at home.

During British colonal rule in the nineteeth century, expansion was presented as a moral mission, in order to save the local black population from invading Arabs. Today, the interests of the Sudanese people is no more at the heart of the West's intervention now than it was then.

Picture: Soldiers from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment patrol Tal Afar, Iraq. This photo appeared on www.army.mil.

Free speech is always our best weapon

2006-05-11T10:12:00.000+01:00

The demand for absolute freedom of speech is another way of saying that we should expect to be treated, as intelligent, rational adults that are more than capable of deciding and thinking for ourselves - the opposite is that we are treated like children that need surrogate parents to shield us from the world of naughty pictures and vulgar words.

Absolute free speech means that social issues can be dealt with through open dabate and the clash of opposing veiw points - there is no need for censors, bans or grossly over-sensitive codes of conduct or practice.

The demand for unfettered free speech is an expression of public faith in the human potential, it's about what we think of people - the danger these days is that free speech is under attack because of the shift in the way we see ourselves and other people.

Today, in New Labour's New Britain, censorship is viewed as something that is worthy, a necessary measure to protect vulnerable people from abuse, harrassment, or against material deemed to be 'offensive'. On just about any issue the call for moral censorship and a strict code of emotional correctness means there can only be one line of debate that can be conducted in public discussion - and woe betide the fool that has the temerity to do something outrageous like thinking for themselves like the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten.

Those who step from the emotionally/morally correct path are no longer viewed as people who have alternative arguments or opinions, they are seen as the Devil itself, and must be crucified in public - and then gagged.

I for one have always remained committed to a no-nonsense support of free speech. I'm prepared to take responsibility for what I say, without the interference of any Victorian ethical watchdog to protect certain sensibilities.

Picture:

Front cover of The New Individualist, Winter, 2005

Mr George Clooney, I presume - Africa's new expert

2006-05-11T09:25:00.000+01:00

What I'd like to know is, since when, has the millionaire, Oscar winning actor, George Clooney become an expert in the political affairs of the Sovereign state of Sudan? The self-proclaimed expert of contemporary Sudanese politics, Mr Clooney, apparently, has knowledge of what is happening in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Clooney told a audience of the world's media that, events unfolding in Darfur could only be discribed as 'the first genocide of the 21st century'.

I'd like to let readers of this blog into a not so well known fact: there is no evidence of 'genocide' in the Darfur region of Sudan. Of course, Mr Clooney doesn't need evidence to support his unfounded claims. He speaks, the world listens, and that is that - who needs evidence?

There is no evidence of a 'genocide' in Sudan - an indepth UN investigation concluded in Feb of last year that there was 'no evidence' of 'genocide' in Darfur. An investigation led by the European Union in the summer of 2004, drew the same conclusion, that the killings in Darfur 'were not genocidal'.

Clooney, has become what the U.S. Department of State would call a first-class 'prognosticator'. Clooney has done what many in the west do in order to draw attention to their particular cause, he has grossly overemphasised the degree to which violent deaths have contributed to large-scale mortality in Darfur. Or in other words, more people in the Darfur region die of malnutrition and infectious diseases, than they do at the hands of the Sudanese government forces.

Clooney is a major American celebrity who think its ok to be cavalier with the facts, and he seems to think its perfectly fine to present Africans in the most horrific terms possible, even if its inaccurate.

I, for one, welcome an honest debate about what's happening in Africa. What we don't need is overpaid Hollywood actors rehearsing powerful and emotive stories about nonexistent 'genocide', in countries they know very little about.

The original Caribbean Jacobins

2006-05-10T20:05:00.000+01:00