Archive for the 'Opinion' Category
Yours Truly on 4Thought
Published February 21, 2012 Opinion 7 CommentsTags: atheism, Channel 4 News, Religion, Richard Dawkins
This week on 4Thought – those little films aired after the Channel 4 News – the topic is “Do we Need Religion“. My slot is on Thursday evening (23rd February) at 7.55pm.
Needless to say, I don’t think we do need religion any more – indeed, I wonder if we ever did. We managed to survive, as a species, before most of the “modern” mono-theistic religions were conjured-up. We managed to thrive, indeed. Perhaps part of the reason for our success was the ethical basis of our relations with our fellow human beings: reciprocal altruism, to lapse into Dawkins-speak.
Atheists and Humanists tend to be better at articulating ethics, these days, than people of faith. Part of the reason is that – as the evidence shows – free thinkers tend to be more intelligent. But, also, Atheists tend not to claim membership of a tribe or gang that assumes moral superiority over others. Unlike religionists, Atheists don’t have to sign-up to a tithe-based club, stick to a liturgy, or issue repetitive chants. Free thought is our only mantra.
Check out 4ThoughtTV to watch some of the previous episodes. I recommend Trevor Moore’s film. He does an especially good job at explaining that religion of the noodly appendage: The Church of the Flying Spaghetti. You’ll have to wait to later in the week to see mine. Or watch it on Channel 4, 7.55pm, Thursday. Let’s hope the edit gets my best side.
Warsi, Paterson and the “Holy See” – pushing against the tide
Published February 16, 2012 Opinion Leave a CommentTags: Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Catholic Church, Christianity, Family planning, Holy See, Islam, Owen Paterson, Western world
Paterson meets the pope. Is that a good thing?
Earlier in the week the “Secretary for the Holy See’s Relations with States”, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, hosted talks between the “Holy See” and a British Government Ministerial delegation led by Baroness Warsi. The delegation also included the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Owen Paterson.
A joint communique was issued at the end of the meeting.
It included the following statement:
Too many people are still hungry, too many people do not have access to education and to decent work, too many women die in childbirth. In view of these challenges we recognise a shared obligation to achieve a fair international financial and trade framework. And we will strive for a better future for all humanity, taking into particular account care for the poorest people in the world.
Indeed. However, in most cases the reason that too many people are too hungry, and that too many do not have access to education or paid work, is because of over-population and lack of birth control – and the institutionalised degradation of women. The Holy See’s failure to encourage the use of contraception and family planning – and abject failure to promote equality and equal status for women in some of the world’s poorest societies – has manifestly contributed to the very problems to which the joint communique alludes.
Baronness Warsi – a Muslim – was at pains to point out that “Christianity is as vital to our future as it is to our past”. Thankfully that’s not the case. Only a minority of people in the UK attend any type of church regularly. The United Kingdom is rapidly dispensing with religion. And, as for the Holy See, it’s an institution in crisis. It has failed to adequately address the issue of clerical abuse at its heart. The majority of its church members in the West ignore most of its core teachings. It has become the ultimate menu religion. Moreover, it doesn’t even represent Christianity – Christianity has splintered off in a myriad of directions, and has no unified voice on just about any social issue. Moreover, Islam is side-lining the Catholic Church in importance – it is by far the world’s fastest growing religion. In the period 1990-2000, approximately 12.5 million more people converted to Islam than to Christianity.
The British government needs to be much more cognisant of the growing public indifference to religion in the UK – and the inevitable marginalisation of all religions in secular Western societies. The Cabinet Office is pushing against the tide – and Baronness Warsi is alienating even her own cabinet colleagues (with the obvious exception of Owen Paterson) in taking part in these pointless and counter-intuitive delegations to failing, anachronistic, sexist dynasties.
More useful than the joint statement from Her Majesty’s Cabinet Office and The Holy See, is the following extract from the Science Summit on World Population – issued in 1993, and still as relevant today.
Millions of people still do not have adequate access to family planning services and suitable contraceptives. Only about one-half of married women of reproductive age are currently practicing contraception. Yet as the director-general of UNICEF put it, ”Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology now available to the human race.” Existing contraceptive methods could go far toward alleviating the unmet need if they were available and used in sufficient numbers, through a variety of channels and distribution, sensitively adapted to local needs.
But most contraceptives are for use by women, who consequently bear the risks to health. The development of contraceptives for male use continues to lag. Better contraceptives are needed for both men and women, but developing new contraceptive approaches is slow and financially unattractive to industry. Further work is needed on an ideal spectrum of contraceptive methods that are safe, efficacious, easy to use and deliver, reasonably priced, user-controlled and responsive, appropriate for special populations and age cohorts, reversible, and at least some of which protect against sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS.
Reducing fertility rates, however, cannot be achieved merely by providing more contraceptives. The demand for these services has to be addressed. Even when family planning and other reproductive health services are widely available, the social and economic status of women affects individual decisions to use them. The ability of women to make decisions about family size is greatly affected by gender roles within society and in sexual relationships. Ensuring equal opportunity for women in all aspects of society is crucial.
Thus all reproductive health services must be implemented as a part of broader strategies to raise the quality of human life. They must include the following:
Efforts to reduce and eliminate gender-based inequalities. Women and men should have equal opportunities and responsibilities in sexual, social, and economic life.
Provision of convenient family planning and other reproductive health services with a wide variety of safe contraceptive options. irrespective of an individual’s ability to pay.
Encouragement of voluntary approaches to family planning and elimination of unsafe and coercive practices.
Development policies that address basic needs such as clean water, sanitation, broad primary health care measures and education; and that foster empowerment of the poor and women.
“The adoption of a smaller family norm, with consequent decline in total fertility, should not be viewed only in demographic terms. It means that people, and particularly women, are empowered and are taking control of their fertility and the planning of their lives; it means that children are born by choice, not by chance, and that births are better planned; and it means that families are able to invest relatively more in a smaller number of beloved children, trying to prepare them for a better future.”
Why the Labour Party and Jim Murphy are hypocrites on the Union
Published January 14, 2012 Opinion 3 CommentsTags: Jim Murphy, Labour, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Social Democratic and Labour Party, Union
Image via Wikipedia
Yesterday Jim Murphy, Shadow Defence Secretary, made clear that the Labour Party would be leading the charge to defend the Union in Scotland. However, he may have missed that the fact that Union he is defending is the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Labour conveniently ignores the fact that the Labour Party does not defend the Union here.
It is constitutionally offensive for a Party that aspires to govern the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to systemically refuse to seek a mandate in a part of it (i.e. the Northern Ireland bit). Moreover Labour’s sister party here – the SDLP – only appeals to Nationalists (and almost exclusively Catholics). It’s a Party whose elected representative cannot even bring themselves to refer to Northern Ireland as Northern Ireland. Instead they refer to “The North”, or “the region”.
The SDLP also takes diametrically opposite positions to Labour on local issues. For example it opposed the last Labour government’s positions on a host of issues (like uncapped domestic rates for Northern Ireland). It certainly is not the manifestation of the British Labour Party in Northern Ireland. Indeed most SDLP voters would be Conservative voters if they lived in Great Britain.
The Labour Party’s position is to deny left of centre pro-Union voters in Northern Ireland any opportunity to support the Party or vote for it. And yet it supports the Hillsborough Agreement which maintains the status quo of continuance of the Union with Britain so long as the majority so wish. In short, therefore, Labour’s position in terms of organisation and seeking a mandate is pro Irish Nationalist (as its sister Party is pro Irish Nationalist). That is the reason why the Party’s Unionist position for Scotland is fundamentally hypocritical – and why Jim Murphy needs to get his act together.
Iron Lady: A Review
Published January 12, 2012 Opinion Leave a CommentTags: Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher. Image via Wikipedia
I makes no bones about it. I was a Thatcherite. I acknowledge that her track history is far from faultless. As Education Secretary she did not do enough to defend Grammar Schools, or academic selection (a system that gave her the opportunity to gain entry to Oxford and to subsequently climb the greasy pole). Her arrogance and obstinacy over the Community Charge/Poll Tax issue was flawed also. But Thatcher was unquestionably the greatest British Prime Minister of the last century. Indeed, I’d argue that she was greater than Churchill.
When the film-makers set out to make Iron Lady they did not necessarily want to make her appear great. Some say that the movie is more of a study of ageing and dementia.
However, they miss the point. What makes Thatcher remarkable was her leadership, not her dementia.
Thatcher was a remarkable leader – remarkable in that she was an exceptional woman in a male dominated political world. And remarkable in that she defined her leadership on the basis of her ideological passion. She also changed the United Kingdom (massively for the better, I would argue, but others might disagree).
Therefore the focus of the film on her dementia or ageing was overdone. Indeed, from a cinematic point of view, it became boring. The opening sequence drags on too long (with Carol and her helpers having muttered conversations about her not being “let out”) and the metaphor – of her constantly talking to a dead Dennis – becomes simply annoying. It becomes a dramatic device that grates.
Moreover the political narrative becomes a catalog – with none of her defining leadership characteristics explored in any real depth (because so much time is taken up with her clearing her husband’s wardrobes).
And what were those defining characteristics? Without question, the most important was her ability to lead on the basis of commitment to what she believed. She believed in the primacy of the individual. She believed in the requirement to lead based on legitimacy of argument rather than requirement for populism. And she understood the nation because she came from from it rather than hovered above it.
Even the Church thinks the government has gone too far in its proposals for Bishops in the Lords
Published November 14, 2011 Opinion 5 Comments
Even Rowan Williams thinks the government is going too far...
This article is republished from the British Humanist Association website…
Bishops sitting in the House of Lords should not be exempt from “serious offence provisions” the Church of England stated today, opposing the government’s proposals set out in its draft House of Lords Reform Bill. The British Humanist Association (BHA), which had strongly criticised the government’s proposals in its own submission to the parliamentary Joint Committee currently scrutinising the Bill, welcomed the statement from the Church, and described the government’s proposals as ‘seriously disturbing’.
In a written paper signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, the Church of England stated that it had not sought exemptions proposed ‘by the Government for the Lords Spiritual from the tax deeming provisions, the serious offence provisions and those on expulsion and suspension’.
BHA Chief Executive Andrew Copson commented, ‘As they stand, the government’s proposals mean that on the most serious matters, Bishops in the House of Lords would be accountable to the Church of England and not to parliament. Even the Church now does not want that, so in whose interest has the government made these seriously disturbing proposals?
‘Given that the Church’s position is firmly to support having automatic seats for its Bishops in our parliament, including on a different basis from other members, its rejection of the government’s proposals to exempt those Bishops from the serious offence provision and those on expulsion and suspension is certainly surprising but welcome.’
The Past Isn’t The Future
Published November 9, 2011 Opinion 3 CommentsTags: Conservative Party, Northern Ireland, Owen Paterson, Sinn Fein
Image via Wikipedia
The following article was written for the Belfast Telegraph. Not sure if it was published.
Northern Ireland doesn’t have much of a commercial sector. But one of its biggest industries must surely be ‘the past’. No people in the developed world talks quite so much about former glories, and former shame.
On the glory front we used to have a great footballer who became one of the game’s most famous womanisers and alcoholics. We named an airport after him. We used to build big ships, and the ugly cranes that built them have become symbols of our industrial legacy. On the shame front we mounted a public enquiry into the killings of innocent people in Derry in the earliest days of our civil unrest – and the enquiry made millionaires of many lawyers and took twelve years to reach a conclusion.
Where, just about everywhere else, the natural tendency is to move on and learn from experience there is a tendency, here, to create vast public obelisks dedicated to the past. Per capita, we must have one of the most complex sets of quangos it is possible to have in a democracy. The so-called cuts have yet to make any material dent in our tendency towards over-engineering our civil society with the pedants of quango-land.
There is a place for institutions to look at the past. Indeed, the entire legal system has been created to seek resolution to events that took place in the recent or not so recent past. But public enquiries are something else again – and quite why they are demanded so much is a mystery to me. If the purpose of a judicial process is to reach a quick and just solution, public enquiries must be one of the worst means of achieving such an objective.
The Conservative Party published figures that suggest that the Bloody Sunday Inquiry cost everyone in the UK £6.64. The total cost of £400 million would have paid for a year’s salary for more than 15,000 nurses, nearly 5,000 doctors and 11,000 policemen, or 13 extra Apache helicopters for British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I’d suspect that is a key reason why Owen Paterson and David Cameron have been so reluctant to agree to a public inquiry relating to the Pat Finucane murder. Is the sledge-hammer to be justified just because this is Northern Ireland and this is how we tend to crack nuts? No.
But there’s another point to be made. The entire “peace process” industry should not be our biggest industry. It tends to stifle everything else. This is not to detract from the grief of families that were made to suffer in Northern Ireland’s troubles. But at some point we have to move on as a Society – and as a Society we have to say “enough is enough”.
Unfortunately many of our politicians don’t agree. Sinn Fein’s tendency to add layer upon layer of complexity to our institutions of “post conflict resolution” is designed to ensure that we never arrive at a position where we’re post-conflict. Instead, it would appear, we have to reside in the perpetual motion machine of recriminations and blame. And the Unionist parties’ tendency towards tit-for-tat response to every Shinner demand oils the cogs of the never-ending vitriol machine. It must cause us to question whether they, collectively, have our best interests at heart.
Unfortunately our political class reflects back at us at every opportunity the shame of our past and its ability to keep tugging us back to the same old, nasty conversations that are, ultimately, divisive and damaging.
There is another way and it’s a way that is being taken by most people who live and work here and try to retain the correct perspective on life and living. Because most in our society choose to shut themselves off from the peace processing discourse. Most get on with their jobs and their life isolated from the never-land conversations that never reach a resolution.
As a people most of us yearn for a political class to emerge that reflects our real, innate need for empathy with our real, everyday situations. And that would require political understanding that has very little to do with the past and everything to do with the present.
No Real Republic?
Published October 30, 2011 Opinion Leave a CommentTags: Dáil Éireann, Ireland, Labour, Martin McGuinness, Michael D Higgins
Michael D Higgins. In his final speech to the Dail argues that a real Republic has yet to be created in Ireland. Now he's the President of that Republic. Image via Wikipedia
As someone on the Libertarian wing of Conservatism I would take issue with much of Michael D Higgins’ sweeping assertions about the evils of individualism in this speech (see below). But as Higgins is the new President-elect of Ireland, I thought readers may be interested in gaining an insight of the man’s world views – and perspectives on Irish nationalism and Republicanism.
The speech is a veritable tour de force – his final to the Dail. He appears to have a few notes, but refers to them little. But it’s a remarkable speech in that it is made to an almost empty chamber which, in a strange way, adds weight to the points he makes about the failure of the Republic and the failure of the political class in Ireland to create one.
Indeed, Higgins refers to three failures in Irish democracy: failure in terms of participative government, failure in terms of adminstrative inclusion and abject failure in terms of communications between and across all strata of society. And while he falters a little at the start of his speech, he soon gets into his stride. If you thought Michael D Higgins was a gentle old poet, if you listen to this speech you’ll get a good idea about the extent of his socialist radicalism.
However, I forgive him for this partly because his passion is deep-rooted in his background and his genuine concern for social inclusion. The central premise of his speech is that while Egalitarianism and Nationalism were at the core of radical Republicanism in 1916, Nationalism became predominant – squeezing out any real Socialist notions that the emerging Free State had.
He also discusses the anti-Intellectual basis of the state – a point that resonates here in Northern Ireland. Even Sinn Fein, that used to claim to have some type of Marxist agenda, now plots, schemes and and strategises in its lust for power over any real ideological basis to its ambitions.
Strategic and Mindful of Grief
Published October 28, 2011 Opinion 1 CommentTags: Irish presidential election, Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein
The bus to nowhere. Image by infomatique via Flickr
The most important learning that the Sinn Fein leadership has taken from the pitifully low polling for Martin McGuiness in the Irish presidential elections is (according to Gerry Adams in an interview for RTE today) that they need to be “strategic” and “mindful” of the grief of families of victims of IRA thuggery.
So there you have it. The IRA caused the grief. Adams and McGuinness were IRA leaders. Now they have to be strategic and mindful of the grief they caused in order to get more votes.
I believe that encapsulates why the winner of the Irish presidential campaign, Michael D Higgins, polled three times more first preference votes than McGuinness. A veritable thrashing. Well done Mr Higgins.
The Incredible Shrinking Northern Ireland Electorate
Published October 19, 2011 Opinion 1 CommentTags: Northern Ireland, Westminster
Image via Wikipedia
The following article was published in today’s Belfast Telegraph print edition…
In the 2010 General Election just over half of our electorate here in Northern Ireland (57.6%) bothered to vote. This was the lowest turnout for all of the UK regions and the lowest turnout for a Westminster election since the records for such things began back in 1945. One could argue that part of the reason for this low turnout was the restoration of devolution. Voters here, some might argue, are less likely to vote in Westminster elections because the Assembly is responsible for more “bread and butter” issues – to lapse into the jargon of the typical MLA. However, that’s not the case either…because in the Assembly elections turnout was even worse. Turnout, in some constituencies, fell to well under 50% – in constituencies such as North Down and East Antrim.
Since the elections nothing has been done to address this problem. Our politicians are behaving like nothing is wrong – that we still have a proper political discourse and that party politics can go as before. But they can’t. In fact there is a vast yawning gulf between party politics and the body politic.
Northern Ireland’s system of participative democracy has been pulled asunder because of a series of perfect storm forces that have been acting upon it. One force is the underlying desire for a proper secular basis to our politics – outside the seriously tedious debates about “culture” or “identity”. Another force is the disgust at the grubby grabathon that modern politics has become – with apparatchik political advisors, dodgy deals and shady goings-on. But the most profound force, resulting in the disengagement of the electorate, is the sheer creepiness of the political class – one that seems incapable of understanding how bizarre local party politics seems to most of us.
The remoteness of the political class becomes more obvious when one looks at how each of the parties behaves. The DUP chose to entirely ignore the fact that the public perception of it – and its leading dramatis personae – careered to rock bottom because of the patronising tone it adopted in the midst of the various Robinson debacles. Rather than learning any lessons from the general election result – that saw its party leader lose his Westminster seat to Alliance – the party merely re-grouped and re-secured its East Belfast seat at the Assembly elections (although turnout in Belfast East slumped from 60% in 2007 to 53.6% in 2011). In short – the DUP appears to have no interest in re-securing the disengaged and disenfranchised. It merely wants to maximise its vote in the runt of the electorate that bothers to turn out.
Similarly Sinn Fein has chosen to ignore the public disgust at the appointment of Mary McCardle as a special advisor to the “Culture” Minister. The UUP has chosen to ignore the fact that its public perception – since its appointment of Tom Elliott as Leader – is that it has no real relevance (if it ever had) to any voters East of the Bann. The SDLP, witters on constantly about regional politics, Ireland this and that, a pan-Irish discourse etc., thereby totally losing us all in its esoteric, navel-gazing rants.
The result of all of this is the incredible, shrinking, Northern Ireland electorate.
In short, it appears that the political system that created vast turnouts in the past is no longer fit for purpose for a present, and future, that requires a different type of politics. Big turnouts of the past were the stuff of sectarian headcounts. Indeed, even in the most recent assembly elections the largest turnouts were in rural constituencies where the tribal drums could be beaten the loudest. Fermanagh & South Tyrone had a turnout of around 69% versus around 46% in leafy, middle class North Down.
Northern Ireland, it would appear, needs a version of the Arab Spring to clear out what has come before. The entire basis of our party politics is completely wrong for a series of political debates that affects us all. Like hapless Apprentice contestants, the local political parties set out their stalls in the wrong locations with the wrong merchandise – and hardly anyone bothers to turn up or buy.
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