Monday 22 June 2009

What is Sarkozy's motivation for this?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8112821.stm

President Sarkozy of France has spoken out against Muslim French women wearing the full burkha, saying that it 'reduced them to servitude and undermined their dignity'. This is widely regarded as a prelude to the establishment of a parliamentary commission which may in the long run ban the wearing of burkhas in public. This is a sickening denial of an individual's human right to practice their religion and whatever that entails - provided that, of course, this does not inpinge on the liberty of others.

Quite frankly, I do not mind if women wear the burkha in public (so, no, it doesn't inpinge on my liberty and nor should it one anyone else's). The negligable, quite frankly miniscule minority who have in the past used it to disguise suicide bombs (and bombings have never been carried out in the West this way it must be said) number less than that other minority who say that it excludes these women from society. Unfortunately, the French government seems to fall into this latter category.

Yes, the women look 'different', but so do hassidic Jews. So, to be honest, do monks. Sarkozy's arguments completely contradict what most women who wear the burkha would say. Rather than reducing them to servitude and undermining their dignity, they serve as a very visible manifestation of women's deep religious beliefs. Sarkozy claims that they are a symbol of the paternalistic, submissive nature of conservative Islam synonymous with (although he doesn't specifically say this..) forced marriages, beatings and the like.

He has clearly missed the point. 99.9% of women wear their veil because it reflects their deep belief. It is a human right. Surely, Sarkozy must recognise this to some extent. The question is, then, what is his motivation? Is he racist? Unlikely. Is he so caught up in France's famous secularist culture that he is tripping over himself to deny the legitimate rights of thousands of French women? Possibly. This is significant because it has precedents in history, not least Nazi Germany in the 1930s when Jews started to emigrate as a direct result of the harsh policy of Nazis.

Wednesday 17 June 2009

Oh, isn't it terribly awful about the Speaker..

It's a feature of British politics that really annoys me; politicians, the public, the media, you name it - they will call on a public figure to go, they will hound him or her, they will rake up all manner of arguments to support their claims. Then, when the individual finally gets out of their bunker and resigns, caving in to the pressure, it is followed by a collective "oh, he wasn't that bad", "we'll really miss her", "she was an excellent so-and-so".

I watched tributes to the former Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, today with a certain degree of cynicism. MPs and in some cases party leaders (Nick Clegg) who called for Martin's head gushed with praise for 'Gorbals Mick'. As a result, I was quite happy when Martin used his last address to attack party leaders for not supporting his plans last year to overhaul MP's expenses.

Praising individuals after you have stuck the knife in is nothing new in UK politics. A couple of years ago, after a sustained attack on former LibDem leader Ming Campbell about his age (65) and apparent unsuitability for the job, the former Olympic medal winner stepped aside and this paved the way for the younger Clegg. Again, immediately afterwards praise was heaped onto Campbell as a very able leader who, indeed, is well respected across the political spectrum and in the country (dodgy expenses notwithstanding!)

Historians among us will recognise that age is no barrier to success in politics: Gladstone - 85 years old in retirement in 1894. Churchill - 81 years old in 1955.

This leaves me with a simple conclusion. In both the Westmister 'soap opera' and civil society we all love to see someone dragged through the mud even if their credentials or record do not merit this. We lick our lips with anticipation as we wait for the axe to fall. When it does, we face sober realisation - we've dispatched with one of the 'good guys'. Gushing praise is one way to compensate for these guilty feelings.

Friday 12 June 2009

An apologist for right wing conservatism

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind some Conservatives. It's a belief that certainly bucks the trend of late, however, I passionately believe that there are politicians in all parties who go into politics because they want to change things. They are fundamentally decent people. David Davis comes to mind...Lord Tebbit is NOT a decent person.

In a letter to The Spectator, Tebbit says that he does not think that there is anything right wing about the BNP. He believes that the party displays the old left wing policies of Labour before Blair et al. He regards history's greatest racists as leftists - Pol Pot, Mugabe and Stalin. To top it all he points out that 'Nazi' is short for NDSAP, or - National Socialist German Worker's Party.

Let's make one thing clear. Tebbit refuses to believe that the far right is the place for objectionable views because it provides room and justification for his own arch-conservatism. Indeed, he was the biggest right winger in the Thatcher cabinet - and made Thatcher herself look like someone whom Michael Foot was regard as a 'a bit of a lefty'

Of course Tebbit forgets to mention that the Nazis hated communism. Hitler campaigned for 20 years prior to becoming Chancellor on a platform of destroying the 'Reds' whom, for him along with Jews were responsible for the defeat of 1918. In power, Hitler banned the party (along with all others) and abolished trade unions. Economically, the extreme right and left do favour state control, the former through massive state corporations, the latter through worker's control. However, a fundamental difference remains - for fascists the state must become even more powerful. For communists and socialists it must wither away.

Furthermore, I don't think the BNP would take kindly to being regarded as 'left wing'. Only this week, Griffin railed against the 'liberal left' in the Unite Against Fascism movement for egging the leader a 'legitimately elected political party'. Opposition to Europe is a fundamentally right wing principle (socialists, by their very nature are internationalist), as are old fashioned attutudes to education and reluctance to invest in foreign aid (see BNP website http://bnp.org.uk/). We all know that anyone who criticises the BNP is, in their eyes, a Marxist nut, the 'mob' who attacked Griffin outside Parliament on Wednesday were under the auspices of the 'hard left'.

Clearly, Tebbit simply wants to pile the responsibility for the more extreme variants of his ideology on the left. Yes, communism has been responsbible for the deaths of millions (Stalin's purges and famines), however, to call fascism a left wing ideology is a complete contradiction in terms. At its heart fascists believe that life is a struggle between races, some of which are fundamentally better than others. Socialists don't see races, merely classes. Stalin fell into the old fascist trap of seeing some people as 'more equal that others', however true socialism has none of the hatred, bigotry and plain old idiosyncracies of its cousin on the far right. I am saddened that a former cabinet member will engage such a cheap argument not only when the old left-right argument is dead in the political mainstream but just so he can legitimise his own extreme views.

Is it any secret that he finds himself more akin to the BNP than the Tories? To make himself feel better Tebbit has had to dispense with some of the 'baggage of history'.

Monday 8 June 2009

A dark day...

I'm sitting here listening to 'If you tolerate this...' by the Manic Street Preachers:

And if you tolerate this
Then your children will be next...
...Gravity keeps my head down
Or is it maybe shame
At being so young and being so vain...
...And on the street tonight an old man plays
With newspaper cuttings of his glory days

To be renamed - *An ode for the abstainers* ??

I could have chosen a different quote - 'All that is left fo evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing' - Perhaps that's even more apt; PR elections are more democratic, however the problem comes with a low turnout when marginal parties like the BNP are elected. And that is exactly what happened today.

I happily blogged a year ago that the BNP had failed to succeed in the local elections. I remember my time in Carlisle - a key background for the BNP - characterised by fascist campaigning and leafleting. Ultimately such efforts were in vain. Now these neo-Nazis have two MEPs. Notwitstanding the fact that Euro-elections didn't exist during Mosley's day, one cannot get away from the fact that the far right can claim their biggest electoral achievement in British political history.

Their success can be boiled down to several reasons:
1. Anger over MPs expenses and general disillusionment with the Westminster system/the (warped) belief that MPs are 'in it for as much as they can screw out of the general public'
2. The rightward direction of New Labour over the last decade and a half - the inevitable skewing re: the distribution of wealth and the political 'disenfranchisement' of the old Labour party's natural constituency - the white working classes
3. Linked to the above - the working class's belief (wrong) that Labour has abandoned them and opened the floodgates to waves of immigrants (mainly eastern European) who have taken jobs and drained public finances through benefit claims.
4. The world economic crisis - probably less important than it may first appear to be - Brown has been largely praised for his statesmanlike approach regarding the financial crisis and benefitted a lot from the G20 (although expenses has largely negated this). Plus, no other British politician is seen as a better option in this respect - Cameron, for example, is still seen as a risky soft option.
5. The political nous of the far right to 'seize the moment', play on people's fears and exploit their own coverage and that of the discredited main parties for their own political gain. In this regard, the actions of the Telegraph has been abominable (has the editor been in the pay of Griffin et al?).

These tactics are nothing new, however, they have just come at a time when people are feeling other anxieties. This has created a toxic stew which has resulted in fascists representing me in the European parliament.

More to follow. I'm trying to organise my thoughts on this one -