Politics

As MPs Debate Making Eid and Diwali Public Holidays, The Wall of Separation Is Under New Threat

Samuel Hooper6 Comments

Leicester Diwali celebration

 

The wall of separation between church and state is under threat once again.

Not officially, of course. We in Britain have no written constitution, no final recourse to turn to in the event of gross government or judicial overreach, or the flagrant violation of our natural rights. But nonetheless, just as progress is being made elsewhere in placing religion in mutually beneficial quarantine from government, the parties of God (a term coined by the late Christopher Hitchens) are launching a counter-attack. And this time the attack comes not from the aggrieved Christian plurality, but the Muslim and Hindu minorities.

The BBC reports:

MPs are set to debate an e-petition aiming to make Eid and Diwali public holidays in the UK.

The e-petition is being championed in Parliament by Conservative MP Bob Blackman, after being signed by more than 120,000 people.

It is only fair that Muslims and Hindus have “the most important days in their faiths recognised in law”, the petition argues.

It should be noted that the government has already rejected the petition. But the fact that a Member of Parliament (and a conservative one at that) is willing to publicly go against the grain and argue for greater, not less government enforced religion in the lives of the people is worrying, and a sign that must be watched carefully.

The reasons for not widening the UK’s current public holidays are many, the first being the fact that shoehorning in another two religious public holidays which are set according to religious timetables rather than the economic rhythm and needs of the nation will only further exacerbate the current skewed system. At present, the UK’s bank holidays are concentrated very unequally in the early part of the year: a brace over the Easter weekend, a volley in May, a last hurrah in August and then the long, slow autumnal death march through the rest of the year until the people are saved by the Christmas holidays. This does little to take into account the needs of businesses (who lose their labour for a day), or for people who might wish the days to be spaced out more evenly.

Secondly, unlike many other countries, none of Britain’s public holidays are used for the beneficial purpose of celebrating our entire nation, our shared culture (as opposed to niche interests – a category under which Christianity increasingly falls) or our collective accomplishments as a British people. Unlike the United States, we have no equivalent to Independence Day, when we can all celebrate being British and indulge in an important exercise in positive patriotism. Unlike France, we have no Bastille Day, celebrating pivotal moments in our national history.

Aside from the fact that recognising pivotal days in our nation’s history helps to nurture the ties that bind us all together, it can be a money-maker too – the American economy may lose a day of labour every year on July 4 and Thanksgiving, but how much is injected into their economy through family gatherings, travel and public celebrations? And how great are the non-monetary benefits of fostering a shared sense of collective identity – one which Britain sometimes sorely lacks?

Thirdly, expanding the public holiday schedule to include more religious days would ignore the simultaneous (and popular) campaign underway to make St. George’s Day a national holiday. The saints days for the home nations are not recognised as UK-wide public holidays, which only fosters internal resentment and fuels the nationalist separatist causes which threaten the balkanisation of Britain.

And finally, written constitution or none, Britain urgently needs to raise a wall of separation between religion and our government, a cause that would be significantly set back by bestowing official government sponsorship on even more faiths. That is not to denigrate the great good that many religious congregations, parishes, charities and organisations do every day. But this social good cannot be used as a bargaining chip to blackmail the rest of the country (an increasingly secular one, for good or ill) into following the same lifestyle practices, moral codes or days of observance as the faithful.

Taken to its logical conclusion, ceteris parabus, this would mean the disestablishment of the Easter and Christmas public holidays. But this would not be a good idea. The Christian holidays, by virtue of having been part of our national fabric for so long, now occupy a place in our culture which transcends their religious origin. Many millions of people celebrate Christmas and Easter who have never set foot in a church, and could not name even the most fundamental tenets of the Christian faith. Furthermore, businesses and organisations around the world – especially in Britain’s main trading partners in North America and Europe – also observe these days as public holidays, making it unwise for Britain to deliberately put itself out of sync. Thus, because the Christian holidays are so embedded in our national life, and are an important reminder to our nation’s history and Christian heritage, there should (and will likely never) be no move to end these holidays.

(This is in no way to suggest that religious festivals and holidays cannot or should not be observed in other ways. The annual Diwali celebration in Leicester, for example, is rightly acclaimed as one of the finest in the world – though such celebrations should at all times be privately funded through sponsorship, and never from public money).

Race, culture and religion often make a volatile, contentious mixture. By granting special rights and favours to some, it can only lead to resentment among the unfavoured, and embolden the beneficiaries to ask for yet further recognition in the future. We already live in an age of religious persecution complexes and exaggerated victimhood – from the mild culture war still fought by the socially conservative Christian rearguard in Britain to the disillusioned British youths jetting off to fight for their so-called faith in Syria – and the very last thing we should be doing is anything that fans the fames of discord at home.

The UK’s Hindus and Muslims (and Christians, and everyone else) are all equally British under the law, and have an equal, important stake in our society, to the extent that they are willing to be British first and foremost. Only recently in the Birmingham schools scandal we have seen the damage that can be done to education and to young minds when religion is placed on a pedestal and sycophantic multiculturalist apologists are too petrified of causing offence to stand up for British values against religious extremism.

Rather than debating the admission of two more exclusionary, religion-oriented public holidays to the British calendar, Parliament should be debating a root and branch review of all our existing holidays as part of a broader effort to make our days off count for something more than a chance for a long weekend and an excuse to jet off out of the country.

What if together we celebrated the Acts of Union which created Great Britain? Or Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in the Napoleonic wars? Victory in Europe day? Or any one of many other days that could plausibly be used to draw us together as people of a United Kingdom rather than a fractured coalition of different faiths, interests, grudges and resentments?

For the sake of our fraying national unity, admitting more faiths into the elite club of state sponsorship and approval must be rejected as the misconceived idea that it is.

Strike!

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

SPS strike protest 0b

 

Did life as you know it come grinding to a halt during yesterday’s strike?

Probably not, unless you are a parent who had to make last-minute childcare arrangements because of the teachers walkout and school closures, or you were one of the zero reported cases of people whose houses burned down in the temporary absence of the fire brigade.

The failure of the strikers and the public sector unions to capture the public imagination and win their support is largely down to the fact that the majority of Brits generally accept the need for pay restraint and fiscal conservatism on the part of government, even if they also acknowledge that the clumsy imposition of “austerity” is causing unnecessary hardship and suffering for some of the people most reliant on a big-spending government.

As this blog argued yesterday, it is not enough for opponents of austerity to rail against the “bankers, toffs and Tory scum”, the usual bogeymen of the Left – not if they want to win the next general election. Voters rarely kick out incumbent governments when the economy is on a positive trajectory, and particularly not when the opposition struggles to articulate a convincing vision of how different life would be under their rule.

What, precisely, do the strikers and anti-Austerity demonstrators want? Is it simply a return to pre-austerity 2010 levels of government spending, as though Gordon Brown were still in office? Is it that plus inflation-busting public sector pay raises (at a time when many in the private sector cannot hope for the same)? Or is it something bigger, along the lines of the joyful hippie revolution called for by Russell Brand?

From observing and talking with some of those on strike and others supporting them, it was clear that they have no single answer, no solid idea to rally behind other than to point at the Conservative-led coalition government and say “down with this sort of thing!”

One cannot necessarily expect the grassroots and those on the cutting edge of austerity to be articulate creators of alternative government policy, but from the Labour leadership’s awkward dance around whether they supported the strikes or not, it is clear that they are also stumped for a workable, electorally viable alternative.

With the general election less than 10 months away, the opposition (both official and the activist base) looks and feels very much divided and conquered.

Here are some telling images from the strike which sum up the prevailing atmosphere, taken in London by Semi-Partisan Sam:

SPS strike protest 3 SPS strike protest 4 SPS strike protest 5 SPS strike protest 6 SPS strike protest 7 SPS strike protest 8 SPS strike protest 9

Bankers, Toffs and Tory Scum

Samuel Hooper16 Comments

SPS strike protest 2b

 

“Chav-bashing draws on a long, ignoble tradition of class hatred” – Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization Of The Working Class

 

Less than three weeks ago, fifty thousand people marched through central London almost entirely unnoticed. They came to protest the coalition government’s so-called “austerity” policies and to “demand the alternative”, but their message was lost in a fog of confusion about the undefined alternative they wanted to bring about. Was it the rose-tinted stroll back to the 1970s advocated by Owen Jones, or the peaceful, effortless and joyful revolution promised by Russell Brand? We still don’t know, because they still can’t decide.

Today, Britain observed what was hailed as the largest coordinated industrial action since the general strike of 1926 – but apart from some inconvenienced parents who had to endure the closure of their children’s schools, nobody seemed to notice that anything much was different. And what little serious press attention the strikes garnered was focused mainly on Ed Miliband’s untenable balancing act of supporting the strikers but deploring the strike, and the eyebrow-raising fact that the National Union of Teachers was legally permitted to use a 2012 vote by a fraction of its membership to hold a strike in 2014.

There is a lot of frustration on the British activist Left that they are not being listened to or taken seriously – by the public, the media, the Labour Party, anyone at all. But at some point soon, those people hawking conspiracy theories about a right-wing media cover-up or the dead hand of Ed Balls will have to turn the accusing gaze back in on themselves.

The Left has been shrieking about austerity for four years now, but have utterly failed to convince the electorate that they have a workable alternative. Indeed no alternative has been suggested – save for pumping pre-2010 (or even higher) levels of taxpayer money into the same unreformed government programmes, which is as patronising a suggestion as it is lazy. Worse still, the Left’s level of empathy or willingness to understand the viewpoints of others who do not agree with the “Down With Austerity” mantra is almost non-existent.

Big government apologists on the Left forever accuse the Conservative Party, UKIP and others on the right of stoking fears and indulging in emotional manipulation. Cases of grotesque welfare fraud are cherry-picked and non-representative, they insist, while questioning Britain’s immigration policy and relationship with the European Union is narrow minded at best, but more often a sign of shocking, premeditated race-baiting. But the left use these same techniques freely and often, and they do so in a way that hampers their ability to think of bold new policies to connect with middle Britain.

The bankers. David Cameron’s cabinet of millionaires. Billionaire non-doms. Tory scum. According to many on the Left, this motley crew of villains are not only deliberately rigging the system in their favour (arguably true), they actively delight in hurting the poor at every turn. Michael Gove is an arrogant bully and persecutor of teachers, Iain Duncan Smith is a virtual psychopath in his hounding of the destitute and David Cameron is the evil mastermind at the top, answerable only to Rupert Murdoch. It’s the age-old divide: those on the right think that Left-wingers are well-meaning but misguided, while those on the Left seem to sincerely believe that their right-wing opposites are actually evil.

The anti-Tory slogans and bitter invective have always had their place in Britain’s left-wing grass roots, but when this stubborn inability to empathise with or think like the other side starts to infect people who are supposedly the Labour movement’s greatest minds and political leaders, they have a real problem. The British Left, from Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet on downwards, can’t seem to get past the mistaken notion – perhaps sincerely believed after so many years of constant, mindless repetition – that those on the right really do hate the poor and long to trample them underfoot.

But the anti-austerity protesters, the public sector strikers and their sympathisers on the Left are fighting a bitter battle against a straw man, a distorted vision of the real spectrum of right-wing thinking. While the British right generates ideas and (albeit limited by coalition) implements them in government, the Left rail against a cartoon foe of their own imagining, and almost completely fail to engage with the substance. Voters are able to discern this disconnect – the British left’s gradual conscious uncoupling from reality – which is one of the reasons why the Labour Party is making so little traction in what should be very fair political weather.

Attacking the usual left wing bogeymen – the bankers, toffs and Tory scum – is not an exciting, compelling pitch for an alternative to our present course. It’s the equivalent of a child’s temper tantrum. And whatever truth there is in the insults does not make up for the yawning chasm that exists where viable alternative left-wing policies should be.

In fact, such is the degree of hysteria and inability to comprehend the attitudes of others on the British Left, it is becoming comparable to the worst excesses of the Tea Party in America, where die-hard “patriots” can see no other motive for Barack Obama’s actions than the deliberate, treasonous undermining of the United States by a foreign-born, illegitimate president.

The hardcore US tea partiers have their hallucination of a Kenyan-born, Marxist stooge sent to make America collapse from within, while the British activist Left have their two-dimensional cartoon of the Bullingdon-bred, Eton-educated aristocrat who wants nothing less than the total dismantling of the social safety net and the subjugation of the poor in permanent poverty to be a source of cheap, expendable labour for his friends and benefactors in big business.

In America, the Republican Party tried to ride the Tea Party tiger, but ended up being eaten. The GOP is now completely beholden to its extremist base, and as a result is entirely unable to propose meaningful, workable legislation on anything from deficit reduction to healthcare to immigration reform. In Britain, the Labour Party is perilously close to suffering the same fate – willingly believing its own hyperbole about the callous Tories, and trying to convince itself (and us, the voters) that everything will be okay if only we start pumping more money into existing government programmes and taxing “the bankers” to pay for it all.

This is a depressing state of affairs on both sides of the Atlantic. To self-identify as a Republican in America today is increasingly akin to admitting that you are a reactionary, bigoted nincompoop, either beholden to corporate special interests or too stupid to realise that you are being manipulated by them. And unless something changes very soon, to self identify as a Labour supporter in Britain will proclaim to the world that you are a success-fearing simpleton who would rather see everyone dragged down to the same level of mediocrity than permit spectacular achievement at the expense of government-enforced equality of outcome.

The infinite monkey theorem states that a chimp sat in front of a typewriter will, given infinite time, at some point be bound to unthinkingly hit upon the long and complex sequence of keys that reproduces the complete works of William Shakespeare. By the same logic, if the British Left continue to hold strikes and mass rallies against austerity, probability dictates that eventually they will quite accidentally come up with a politically viable alternative to the coalition government’s spending plans. But unlike the monkeys, they and the Labour Party do not have infinite time.

The 2015 general election is less than ten months away.

How 50,000 People Marched Through London Unnoticed

Samuel Hooper11 Comments

SPS austerity demonstration 001

 

In 2007, satirical news site The Onion reported on the 30th annual Modesto County Ninja Parade, where the townspeople turn out faithfully every year in the futile hope of spotting the stealthy, invisible ninjas as they furtively slip through town.

A similar event took place in London today: the “No More Austerity: Demand The Alternative” protests organised by The People’s Assembly, in which as many as fifty thousand noisy protesters in central London managed to make themselves almost completely invisible. Invisible, at least, to the news media, the general public and the politicians whom they had presumably hoped to persuade.

Even if the resulting headlines were along the lines of “Wealthy Shoppers And Tourists Inconvenienced On Regent Street”, the presence of such a large number of people in central London should have won some attention from the national media, but at this time only the Guardian and Huffington Post UK have carried anything about the event.

This is not a good return on investment on the part of The People’s Assembly, coming in the same week as the ideologically opposite Centre for Policy Studies’ Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty, which generated multiple news stories and a strong wake on social media. Something, somewhere is going wrong for the opponents of austerity, and the most convincing explanation involves a fault in both the message and the messenger(s).

First, the message.

Keynote speaker and Green Party MP Caroline Lucas kindly agreed to be interviewed shortly before she took to the main stage to address the crowd in Parliament Square at the end of the demonstration route. As always, she spoke with great empathy about the plight of people living on or beneath the poverty line, but her policy prescriptions seemed inadequate to the change that she wanted to effect:

 

Calling for higher taxes, a crackdown on avoidance and the scrapping of Britain’s nuclear deterrent – even if you ignore the many side effects resulting from such actions – would only serve to perpetuate an unreformed system of subsidising people who ultimately need (for their sake and the nation’s) to be lifted into self-sufficiency.

When posed with this same question, and the fact that the demonstrators face an up-hill battle in the face of near political consensus from the two main parties (in substance if not in rhetoric), event headliner and spokesperson Russell Brand was only able to repeat his sunny prediction of a joyful, non-violent revolution that would somehow make everything okay:

 

And this is perhaps the main reason that the anti-austerity protests went almost unnoticed today – the messengers were simply too conflicting, and unable to consistently articulate their cause in a way that could win agreement from sympathisers and respect from opponents.

Owen Jones led the way with his excellent, impassioned speech to the assembled crowds. It was fiercely partisan and occasionally played fast-and-loose with the truth about the origins of Britain’s economic problems, but it was also a persuasive and well delivered speech by a very thoughtful, intelligent, charismatic person.

Shockingly, though, event stewards were tugging at Owen Jones’ sleeves to get him to stop talking and make way for the next speaker almost as soon as he had taken the stage, forcing Jones to bring his remarks to an early conclusion:

 

By contrast, comedian Russell Brand, given the honour of closing the entire event (save a couple of musical acts to play everyone out), was permitted to speak at length and say whatever he wanted. Consequently, Brand delivered a meandering (if charmingly self-deprecating) address that made little sense when placed under close scrutiny:

 

“I’ve given you even my vanity”, said Brand after baring his chest as he donned a Fire Brigades Union anti-austerity T-shirt handed to him on stage. But it wasn’t his vanity that The People’s Assembly needed. What they needed was a telegenic intellectual heavyweight with strong ties to the types of people that the demonstrators claimed to represent – the poor, the disabled, the vulnerable and the sick.

The crowd needed someone to tie together the threads of everything that had taken place during the march and rally, drawing together all of the disparate arguments in order to successfully argue that more government spending would actually be a good thing right now (a tough sell when faced with public sentiment and the attitudes of the main political parties).

The speakers at the “No More Austerity” demonstration were well-intentioned (though misguided, in the view of this blog), but a social or political movement that chooses Russell Brand rather than Owen Jones as its figurehead has little ground to complain when their message is met with confusion or indifference on the part of the media and the public.

When celebrities take it upon themselves to become figureheads for a political cause, they have a duty to get to know their topic inside out. To be a good, credible ambassador they must read up not just on the main issues but all of the tangential and second-order considerations so that they are able to engage with politicians and experts as peers and equals.

When Angelina Jolie attended and opened the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in London last week, there was no doubt among anyone present that she knew exactly what she was talking about and was more than qualified to speak on the issue. And so when Jolie stood side by side with William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary, it did not seem the least bit odd or inappropriate (though Hague certainly benefited disproportionately from the Hollywood magic).

Russell Brand, on the other hand, seemed unable to articulate the “alternative” that he and the fifty thousand other demonstrators are demanding. What’s more, he also ignored or trivialised the various political and organisational hurdles that stand in the way of implementing their favoured policies, falling back instead on the denialist notion that a “peaceful, effortless, joyful revolution” will come along and somehow make everything okay. This would be bad coming from a spokesperson, but from one of the supposed leaders of the movement it is completely untenable.

The fact that the alternative was alternately so weakly and idealistically expressed in different ways throughout the day also increases the level of doubt among the public and sceptics (such as this blog) who perhaps believe that the state did expand too far and do too much before the financial crisis, and that some kind of a correction is needed.

By deploying a self-destructive combination of mixed messages and poorly chosen messengers, the people who answered the call to protest today – various trades union, local organisations and interest groups – managed to sabotage their own efforts, becoming virtual ninjas in their own secret parade.

But the sad truth is that many more than 50,000 people in Britain creep meekly through their entire lives, without their struggles, priorities or concerns ever being noticed by the government or others in more fortunate circumstances.

The anti-austerity demonstrators envision a world where a larger, more redistributive and active state perpetually watches over and cares for these people, ensuring their welfare. Others, including this blog, take a different view – that people should be liberated and empowered to the maximum extent possible to flourish on their own, rather than being condemned to an entire lifetime as a “client”, “service user” or “benefit recipient”.

This is an important national debate for Britain to have, one that our elected politicians are poorly placed to lead, occupying the narrow ideological centre ground as they nearly all do. So it is left to the likes of The People’s Assembly and the IPPR on the left, and think tanks such as the Centre for Policy Studies and insurgent parties like UKIP  on the right, to have the proxy debate that would otherwise not take place.

Those on the right might be tempted to rejoice that the “No More Austerity: Demand The Alternative” march received so little attention, and that both message and messenger seem confused and contradictory. But in the long run, it’s not a good thing. The political right cannot test and sharpen their own arguments and ideas when their left-wing sparring partner is struggling even to express itself clearly.

The disorganisation and lack of media awareness shown by The People’s Assembly could well help to ensure that David Cameron’s Conservative Party sneak back across the finish line in the 2015 general election and form another government. But without being held properly to account by the left, the Conservatives will continue to overlook or ignore the needs of some of the weakest and poorest people in Britain (often people who were led down the path of government dependency and then left high and dry by an arrogant Labour government), and fail to help them as best they can with Conservative policies.

Even if the resultant human suffering is not a cause for their concern, the fact that such unaddressed dissatisfaction will eventually bubble up and lead to the Conservatives being punished at the ballot box should make the alarm bells sound.

It was hard, if not impossible, to dislike the people who so stealthily marched through central London today. Setting aside the rightness or wrongness of their policy ideas, it was clear that they genuinely, passionately want the best for the poor, the weak, the dispossessed and for each other.

Laughing, joking or talking earnestly amongst themselves, the only vitriol you were likely to hear from the “No More Austerity” demonstrators was reserved for the usual bogeymen of the left – the bankers, the city fat cats, the multinational corporations and sometimes the inevitable “Tory scum”.

But perhaps the invisible 50,000 should reserve some of their anger for the comrades who organise them, and who craft and articulate their common message. This demonstration, though not huge, should have generated more media coverage, more comment, and more positive action than it did. At present, some of their leaders are badly letting the side down.

And the 50,000 austerity protesters – not to mention the suffering people for whom they claim to speak – cannot afford to have another invisible demonstration.

 

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Demand The Alternative – The People’s Assembly’s Struggle Against Austerity And/Or Reality

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Peoples Assembly No More Austerity

Semi-Partisan Sam will be covering the national demonstration held by The People’s Assembly in London today, entitled “No More Austerity: Demand The Alternative”.

The timing of the protest is somewhat strange, given the fact that we are less than one year away from the 2015 general election and the end of the current coalition government responsible for the “cuts”. Most of the “austerity” policies have already taken full effect and could not be immediately reversed even if David Cameron (and Ed Miliband, who has pledged to stick to the current government’s spending plans should Labour win in 2015) were to witness the crowds at Trafalgar Square and have a sudden change of heart.

In that sense, just like the Judean People’s Front in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the demonstrators gathering outside BBC Broadcasting House tomorrow afternoon will be engaged in a struggle with reality rather than against a policy that they have any hope of altering in the near future.

One glance at the list of supporters and attendees reveals that the protesters hail from a variety of backgrounds and have a range of different interests at stake, though they are united in their opposition to any government cuts of any kind and for any reason. The People’s Assembly founding statement declares they “support every genuine movement and action taken against any and all of the cuts”.

The lack of nuance in this statement is interesting – centrists and those on the right may be curious to delve inside the minds of people who sincerely believe that the state should only ever grow larger and do more for people, and that any interruption of this trajectory automatically equates to wanton cruelty on the part of callous people with no hearts.

Semi-Partisan Sam hopes to have just this opportunity, and to report back not just on what is drawing people out onto the streets in protest, but also on what their ideal alternative version of Britain looks like.

It’s a question worth asking, because despite Ed Miliband’s manifold weaknesses as leader of the Labour Party, there is a real chance that he could enter Number 10 Downing Street as prime minister in 2015 – and he is entirely sympathetic to the People’s Assembly aims, dovetailing as they do so nicely with his own “new politics” of brutal tax hikes and renationalisation.

Hopefully the answer – and the mysterious “alternative to austerity” being demanded – will be revealed at The People’s Assembly Struggle against Austerity Reality in London later today. Celebrity guest Russell Brand certainly thinks so:

“The People’s Assembly will bring down any government that doesn’t end austerity. Austerity means keeping all the money among people who have loads of it. This is the biggest problem we face today, all other problems radiate from this toxic swindle. We can organise a fairer, more just society than they can, these demonstrations are the start, it will be a right laugh.”

So there you have it. There’s a fixed amount of money in the world, and all that’s needed is to have a “right laugh” together, toss around a few ideas, redistribute the cash a bit and everything will be just fine. It will be like the evil Tories never existed.

 

Stay tuned to @SamHooper on Twitter for live-tweets from 1PM onwards (London time), and to this blog for discussion and analysis of the demonstration after the fact.