Does religion make war, not peace?

Mention Middle East mayhem or any other large-scale violence going on in the world and the Saloon Bar Philosophers are bound to blame ‘all that bloody religious nonsense’.

 

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

 

The carnage over the past two millennia, all in the name of religion, almost defies belief.

 

Christians spent the first 1700 years slaughtering each other in the name of Jesus Christ, the advocate of peace and brotherly-love. Dissenters were burned at the stake, tortured to death, hanged, crucified and otherwise done to death in frightful ways. The Spanish Inquisition became a byword for state-sponsored violence against those who were thought not to cling wholly to the diktats of the Vatican. We shall probably never know how many were killed for ‘the peace of God that passeth all understanding’.

 

The 17^th Century European wars, supposedly in the name of religion killed 35% of the total population.

 

Sunni and Shia continue to this day with their spasmodic  civil war that has been the pattern for at least 1200 years.

 

The history of the Jews is a 2000-year history of attempted genocide.

 

Catholic v. Protestant; Hindu v. Muslim; there has been no shortage of contestants

 

Religion certainly has a great deal of ‘previous’ but there is the question of whether it has been the cause or the pretext.

 

There is a thought-provoking review in The Oldie magazine of a new book, ‘Fields of Blood; Religion and the History of Violence.

 

The main theme is that religion has been made a scapegoat for man’s inherent violence.

 

It must be a powerful argument that religion is used as an incitement to hatred, which is the undoubted case in Islamic terrorism, but it is another to say that religion is the cause when it is more likely to be the sense of humiliation and inadequacy that exists in the Arab world, and therefore jihad becomes an Arab phenomenon, not a religious uprising. It scarcely exists outside the Arab world. Terror in Pakistan and Afghanistan is tribal rather than religious.

 

Mankind are social creatures and this is surely more fundamental in causing conflict than religion per se. We form groups based on language, location, customs, family, tribe, pigment, religion and eventually as distinct races and cultures. Anyone who is not a member of the group is a mistrusted outsider, whether from the next village or another continent. Religious belief is probably the most powerful motivating force for extreme action; if our God is right the other must be Satan. Modern ‘religions’ embrace anti-Semitism, racism, nationalism, Communism and a whole raft of ‘isms’.

 

But no major war in the last two centuries has had religion as its main cause. They have all been based on territory, possession, power, wealth, domination; plus, of course, the deranged ambitions of dictators from Napoleon to Hitler.

 

In the final analysis, it is not about religion. It is about domination.

 

"The fault, dear Brutus, is ………in ourselves."

EU: 'The End is Nigh'....but how long, O Lord, how long?

The EU is  like an old bull in the corrida de toros, staggering around full of barbs from the toreros knowing that the matador will finally put it out of its misery but unsure when. And yet however long this takes, the end is inevitable.

 

In all probability the collapse will begin with the Euro. The entire Eurozone economy is becoming a zombie.

 

Growth in Germany, the engine of Europe, has almost ceased. Their budget surplus is the highest in the world; domestic demand is moribund; the population is both aging and declining; public investment is totally inadequate with inevitable deterioration of infrastructure like roads, bridges and canals.

 

France is a basket case.

 

The Club Med stagers from crisis to crisis and has horrifying unemployment, especially among the young.

 

So who will be the matador? Step forward the unlikely figure of  the Pope.

 

In an astonishing address in Strasbourg, he castigated what he (and many) see as the EU’s failings.

 

He said ‘In recent years, as the European Union has expanded, there has been growing mistrust on the part of citizens towards institutions considered to be aloof, engaged in laying down rules perceived as insensitive to individual peoples, if not downright harmful. In many quarters we encounter a general impression of weariness and aging, of a Europe which is now a “grandmother”, no longer fertile and vibrant. As a result, the great ideas which once inspired Europe seem to have lost their attraction, only to be replaced by the bureaucratic technicalities of its institutions’.

 

He stuck in another barb.

 

He referred to ‘certain rather selfish lifestyles, marked by an opulence which is no longer sustainable and frequently indifferent to the world around us, and especially to the poorest of the poor. To our dismay we see technical and economic questions dominating political debate, to the detriment of genuine concern human beings.  Men and women risk being reduced to mere cogs in a machine that treats them as items of consumption to be exploited’.

 

Two more toreros have entered the corrida.

 

First up, Prodi, the former Brussels Mr Big.

 

He says that Britain is already in a state of withdrawal. Its clout in Brussels is at a very low ebb, partly because of Cameron’s inept diplomacy. The outcome has been that the smaller nations that formerly allied with the UK are now clustering around Germany. The political and economic shambles in France  has left only one player in the Premier League. The reality is that there is now a German Europe, when the original intention was a European Germany.

 

Brexit is likely to cause the whole rickety structure to fall apart like a dilapidated old building; no sudden collapse but a crumbling away so that it becomes uninhabitable. It will not be another Holy Roman Empire that lingered on for centuries.

 

Next, the admirable Owen Patterson, arguably the most able Minister in Cameron’s entourage (which may be why he was sacked).

 

His standpoint is that Britain wants nothing to do with ‘ever closer union’; its future is outside the federalising thrust and we must seize back control over treaty-making. Britain is no longer represented on international bodies which control and regulate much of the world economy. The EU is in charge. He rightly says that Britain should have its seat at the table.

 

He advocates a return to a Europe of the single market, with free trade and effective trading arrangements, and abandon the political aspects of the EU.

 

This all sounds like a case for Brexit. If this comes to pass, as seems increasingly possible, the whole construct will start to disintegrate.

 

And all this is coming from a senior Tory, not from Nigel Farage.

 

We live in interesting times!

 

The Tories need White Van Man..............

Maggie Thatcher had it just right; she knew exactly the voter that she should appeal to. He was dubbed ‘Mondeo man’, typified by the Essex diamond geezer who had set up his own business, and  did well under the Tories. Another phenomenon was the ‘barrow boy’, the young guy from East London, Basildon, Southend who became a dealer in the City after the ‘big-bang’ (another Maggie revolution) sent the 3-hour lunch traditional city-types into history.

 

Their standard tipple was champagne instead of lager. They drove Beemers. They were working class, sons and daughters of dockers and Dagenham wage-slaves. But they had ambition, drive, guts, and a risk-taking mentality.

 

Two Thatcherite measures were revolutionary in that they created a new class of proletarian capitalists, the ‘property owning democracy’.

 

The first was the sale of council houses at heavily discounted prices. It brought home-ownership to millions who earlier could only have dreamt of it. The economic effect was immeasurable, giving a valuable asset to people who formerly had none. It slashed the deficits on Councils’ housing revenue accounts. Many sold expensive inner-city properties when the moratoria on re-sale expired, and bought nicer houses in the suburbs; social mobility in action!

 

Now first-time buyers have been virtually forced out of the market by the failure of Government housing policies leading to rapid price-inflation.

 

The second was the opportunity for ordinary people to become small shareholders when they got preferential treatment in the ‘Tell Sid’ privatisation of nationalised industries. It’s a mystery why Cameron failed to do this with Royal Mail.

 

1980 to 1990 was a golden, exciting age. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive; but to be young was very heaven’.

 

But more than 20 years ago I predicted that a political vacuum was being created post-Maggie by the abandonment by all parties of the great mass of predominantly white, working-class people. The emphasis switched to the rights – real or imagined – of minorities ((a former Mayor of London vouchsafed that if you bribed enough minorities with council grants you ended up with a majority).

 

By 2000 or thereabouts politicians with working class backgrounds were becoming an endangered species. The old sons-of-toil who had worked on the factory floor or down the pit, and had served during the war, were the victims of change and time and were mostly displaced by college boys. Middle-class Labour councillors would prescribe all-in wrestling as the entertainment of choice at the local theatre for ‘our people’, when actually the man from the Ford Tractor factory wanted something rather more cerebral and his little daughter wanted the ballet.

 

(Incidentally the Essex Farmers Hunt was heavily biased towards second-hand car salesmen made-good, people in ‘tyres’, small builders and so on. The wrong target for the class-warriors).

 

Under Brown, when regulation of the City was almost scrapped, the professional spivs moved in from around the globe and we went into freefall in  2008.

 

Governments have pursued causes fashionable amongst the Notting Hill elites, such as banning fox hunting, and  smoking just about everywhere, gay ‘marriage’, whilst the economy went to hell in a handcart, unemployment rose uncontrollably, retirees saw their investment incomes collapse when interest rates went south, pitiful educational standards produced a generation of illiterates, and the NHS veered between crisis and scandal.

 

They fostered the great myth of the ‘multicultural society’. We will long suffer the consequences of that misguided price of social engineering.

 

And involved Britain in a pointless war in Afghanistan, the longest continuous conflict ever whilst slashing the defence budget to pay for a 37% increase in foreign aid.

 

Immigration has only recently become a respectable topic of conversation amongst the chattering classes, who have belatedly woken up to the fact that it has become a major political issue, especially amongst those who, unlike the elite, have to live with the consequences of a flood of aliens.

 

The Tories must appeal to ‘white van-man’.

 

Too many politicians are recruited from people of the wrong sort. They represent a class that has no means of understanding the concerns of what used to be known as ‘People of the middling-sort’, the aspirational working-class family who want to get on.

 

Today, politicians of all stripes are almost wholly alienated from the people. They have no idea whatsoever what it is like trying to bring up a family when jobs are uncertain, education is questionable, law-and-order tends to fix on criminalising ordinary folk with a whole spate of new offences that would have been regarded as either risible or oppressive a decade earlier. Hate speech, indeed. Smoking in the pub.

 

The Westminster village where the political elite lives – not just politicians but their camp-followers in the media, lobbyists, PR hacks and the rest - is like a US ‘gated community’. Its denizens know little and care less about what happens outside the gates.

 

But, as the old cliché would have it, ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. UKIP is filling it.

 

 

 

 

Jihadis, passportss and piffle.....

Cameron should be dubbed ‘Taurus’, he is that full of bull.

 

From the beginning, he has spread it around like a farmer in spring. We had the promise of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. More recently we have had his grandstanding on the €2 billion increase in the membership fees to the Euroclub – ‘No way will I pay this by December 1^st’.. Meaning ‘I’ll pay up after the Rochester by-election’.

 

Nobody believes for a moment that he is going to win the argument over EU immigration. Or that he will get concessions from Brussels that will provide a respectable platform for staying in the club, or, indeed, that a plausible, genuine referendum will be held at all. People still have bitter memories about how they were bamboozled by Heath.

 

Now we are told that he is going to prevent British-born jihadi recruits from returning from Syria and Iraq by issuing ‘temporary exclusion orders’ which will cancel their passports and put them on a ‘no-fly’ list.

 

In other words, he will make sure that they are kept in the bosom of ISIS so that they can become fully-trained explosives experts instead of mere cannon-fodder. They can then return to Britain on forged passports, and the security services will have thereby lost track of them.

 

The obvious alternative is to detain them on their return to the UK for prosecution, or restriction on movements, or sent for deradicalisation.  Not beyond the capability of the immigration authority, now that the disastrous Border Agency has been dumped and  Mrs May put in charge? Stopping them from going in the first place when there are good prospects that we will be relieved of the problem by them getting killed is not necessarily the perfect answer.

 

The ban will last for two years. During this time suspect jihadists may be interviewed by police. This might necessarily be in Syria or Iraq, since they will not be able to travel to somewhere a tad safer. Any volunteers?

 

As for confiscating passports, Cameron’s ‘smack of firm government’ is further bull. There is no right to be issued with a passport; it is the Home Secretary’s prerogative to issue, refuse, or withdraw a passport. The government also has power to prevent people from travelling abroad in certain circumstances, and the police have been given extra powers to seize passports. This power is used quite frequently; the demented Islamist Anjem Choudary has just expressed a fervent wish to go and live in the Islamic State. He can’t because Mrs May has confiscated his passport, when she should be paying his air fare. Business class.

 

Then there is the tricky problem of dual passports. Lose one, use one!

 

And the three Canadians recently murdered in the name of Mohammed died at the hands of jihadis who had been refused passports.

 

Lefty lawyers such as Michael Manley have said that this would make people stateless, contrary to international law. Complete nonsense. A passport is not a certificate of citizenship. The main criteria are birth or blood, except when citizenship is acquired by e.g. naturalisation. Loss of a passport is not loss of citizenship.

 

The problem that Dave ought to be addressing is what to do with returnees.

 

If they come back secretly, under the new Counter Terrorism Act they will face 5 years in jail solely because of that.

 

It is estimated that 500 young Muslims have travelled to Syria, 30 have been killed, and 250 have returned home, most of them probably chastened and disillusioned. The Danish, German, and Swedish answer is to ‘deradicalise’ them – reverse brain-washing. In the UK there is a programme, Channel, that runs rehabilitation programmes. There were around 1300 referrals last year. In contrast, there have been only five successful prosecutions.

 

Returnees might not be the main problem. ISIS has called for domestic jihadis to spread terror such as the fouled Remembrance Day plot. There has been no obvious Government response to this.

 

The Government is all bark and no dog.

'Fair blow the winds'...for UKIP!

‘See how the fates their gifts allot,

For some are happy, some are not!’

 

Nigel Farage is a happy one. The fates seem to be smiling on him. The political winds have been favourable to him for months.

 

They have been squalls for Dave and tempests for Red Ed (although in truth the limp-wristed plotters only managed a gentle zephyr).

 

The European Arrest Warrant debate was a shambles, a catastrophic farce , a piece of gerrymandering that came badly unstuck. It showed yet again that Government promises are porkies. Now the debate has been shifted to the day before the Rochester by-election.

 

This what Farage said about it:

 

David Cameron PROMISED a House of Commons a vote on the European Arrest Warrant last night. Guess what? He lied. AGAIN.

This government has consistently treated the British people with contempt. Even the Conservative Party's own Members of Parliament accused it of "deception", and Speaker Bercow, with whom I rarely agree, called it a "sorry saga". He was right.

 

Jacob Rees-Mogg MP said it was "fundamentally underhand" while Bill Cash MP said it was a "disgraceful way of going about a very important matter".

 

Because the government has acted in this way, the British public will likely be dragged back into the European Arrest Warrant, without so much as a vote for our democratic representatives.

 

And yet the Tories want you to believe they are tough on Europe.

 

Nobody was fooled by the claim of a great  victory over the €2 billion heist by Brussels. Everyone knows that the  ‘reduction’ was paid out of the UK’s rebate – our own money!

 

And another thing….

 

The foreign  political advisors brought in by both main parties fail to understand an important part of the British character; we heartily dislike ‘knocking copy’, the sort that aims to promote its product by rubbishing a competitor’s, as if Ford were to plug the Focus by saying that the Golf was a clunker.

 

‘Attack’ ads that foul the American election campaigns don’t work here. Whenever the Tories or Labour try to dig the dirt on UKIP, its share of the vote increases.  The attempt to smear Farage for associating with a Polish wife-beater solely for money reasons backfired badly when Private Eye exposed the fact that the Euro-Tories have got into bed with a whole bunch of Nazis, Fascists and anti-Semites (but cold-shoulder the AvD, the German moderate anti-Euro group).

 

The Telegraph continues to rant against UKIP, sometimes with three separate comment pieces on a single day. Their Socialist scribbler, Dan Hodges, becomes more apoplectic day on day. It has yet to learn that ‘the only bad publicity is your own obituary’.

 

And trust the EU to put the cherry on top.

 

Its decision to ban advertising of harmless e-cigarettes will hand another 2 million Brexit voters to UKIP.

 

To end with more of WS Gilbert’s lyric:

 

‘For Nigel’s happy, oh so happy;

Laughing ha-ha, chaffing ha-ha, nectar-quaffing ha-ha-ha’.

 

Pints of Greene King Abbott all round for UKIP supporters.

 

 

The Artful (tax) Dodger.........

It is one of the biggest tax-havens.

 

At the last count, 340 leading companies launder hundreds of billions through it, paying a derisory  amount of tax on profits, about 1%. Tax on non-dividend income is 0.25%. It is favoured by PepsiCO which moved $750 million to minimise its tax liability on a $1.5 billion purchase of a Russian company, en route to Bermuda. IKEA has a holding company and a finance company to massage its tax liability.

 

There are other familiar names. FIAT and Amazon are amongst the most prominent. There’s Glaxo Smith Klein, the Pearson Group (FT and Economist), Northern and Shell (Daily Express). Fedex launders millions to its eventual destination in Hong Kong. It paid 0.25% tax on its non-dividend earnings. American companies paid 1.1% tax on profits of $95 billion.

 

Key players include Accenture, Abbott Laboratories, American International Group (AIG), Amazon, Blackstone, Deutsche Bank, H.J. Heinz, JP Morgan Chase, Burberry, Procter & Gamble, the Carlyle Group and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

 

One of the most intriguing is that bastion of public morality the Guardian Media Group.

 

US and UK companies lead the pack. $95 billion of American corporations’ profits  flowed through in 2012. The tax paid was 1.1%. Direct investment from the US  in 2013 was $416 billion, most of which was in ‘tax-efficient vehicles’.

 

$3.7 billion is held in managed assets, second only to the US. PWC advises hundreds of companies in how to use the system, employing 2.300 staff for the task. Complex accounting and legal structures are used to move money in and out, giving a tax rate of less than 1%. The Government issues hundreds of private tax rulings – ‘comfort letters’ – giving favourable tax treatment.

 

 

Tax revenues from this huge market are 5% of GDP, higher than British agriculture’s share of GDP in the UK.

 

The country raking in  all this funny money has a population of about 500,000. It covers only about 1000 square miles.

 

You will have guessed by now that the country is Luxembourg.

 

And who was the Prime Minister who presided over this gargantuan tax scam for more than 15 years?

 

Step forward Jean-Claude Juncker.

 

And who is head of the EU which has vowed to crack down on tax dodgers?

 

That’s right!