Filed under: Film Reviews, Justice, Parenting, Politics, Religion, Technology | Tags: Black lives Matter, democracy, justice, Labour Party, Law, media, order, social justice, terrorism, Turkey, values
I enjoy the occasional television drama. One favourite is ‘Person Of Interest’. However watching it today I found myself reflecting on how we are being fed a constant stream of dramas designed to undermine the moral values of society. In many of these stories the heroes are vigilantes like Arrow or the ‘man in the suit’ taking the law into their own hands because of failures in the justice system or deliberate perversions of justice.
Worse than the vigilante is the almost casual acceptance that law enforcers will bend the rules to ‘maintain order’, ‘keep America safe’, ‘wage war on terrorism’. We are fed a constant stream of tales where justice is only served because intrepid law officers spied on personal communications, provoked dissidents into terrorist actions for which they could actually be arrested. We are constantly told by our heroes on television and film that we need the eye in the sky, the CCTV, the phone tap, the DNA library, the electronic ID card. And when our politicians try to impose these things upon us we are told, “If you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear!” If that were true then why are ‘Black Lives Matter’ protesting? Why are journalists being locked up without trial in Turkey?
We cannot be complacent it is in the West that our favourite shows are set. It is we who are being told day in and day out that the price of our safety is the loss of our freedom. That sometimes an innocent man may be shot in the Underground and that’s unfortunate, but worth it if we are to be safe. How do we address these mistakes? More surveillance, more surveillance and less oversight of those who are watching us. We are being told that public order is more important than natural justice. That democracy is too important to be entrusted to the voters.
You may not believe me but just look at the efforts of the establishment to deny democratic freedoms. A Labour Party establishment that wants to deny its members the right to choose their leader, their representatives even the issues on which they will campaign; the other parties are no better. A press that denies coverage or a voice to all whose opinions and beliefs run counter to those who own the levers of power. Effectively the establishment compels direct action by those who wish their voices to be heard and then quashes them in the name of public order. When the limits on freedom are increasingly restricted it is inevitable that decent people will have to fall foul of the law sometimes. Sometimes people have to choose to break the law to protest injustice, there is an ethical argument for doing so.
What is not acceptable, but what our television dramas are telling us is not only acceptable, but necessary is for those charged with upholding the law to bend and break the rules to preserve order. When order is preserved at the expense of the law, when already draconian laws are bent by the establishment we do not have rule of law, we have dictatorship. Dictatorship, not by one person, but a class, but dictatorship none the less.
Filed under: Politics, Scotland | Tags: Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners, democracy, justice, nationalisation, ownership, privatisation, property, royalty, slavery, Trades Union Reform
I have started watching BBC 2’s excellent series of documentaries on ‘Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners’. Although living in Glasgow we are probably more aware of our debt to slavery than in most parts of Britain, I had not realised how much modern Britain stands on a foundation built of enslaved, exploited and dehumanised people. I was surprised at how many of our ‘noble’ families owe their enoblement and wealth to slavery. I was very interested to discover that Britain’s financial sector was funded by the earnings from slavery. Britain’s trading power owes its former dominance to slavery. Many of those who formed our laws owed their position to slavery both in the Lords and Commons and it is their heirs who still dominate society using the industries born from the proceeds of slavery. Horribly slavery could not merely be abolished for the inhuman evil it was, the British taxpayer had to pay the slave owners millions of pounds in compensation.
In Britain we fetishise private ownership and so successive governments are happy to sell the assets that belong to the people to private enterprise for a fraction of their worth, however whenever a private asset like the coal mines or railways has been taken into public ownership the previous owner, like the slavers, have been royally compensated, ironically some of them were descended from those same slavers.
This year the Tories in the UK Parliament thought it great fun to laugh at Cromwell’s enslavement of Scots who were shipped out to the Caribbean plantations, but given the rabid racism of their election campaign, it was hardly surprising. As an Irishman, thousands of whose countrymen were shipped as slaves to the West Indies by Cromwell, I find nothing amusing in slavery. However when all is said and done Cromwell has one thing to commend him, he executed a king. A commoner executing royalty set a precedent for the Jacobins and the Bolshevics to follow. In the debate about EVEL in the Commons when the SNP claimed the People were sovereign, but Dominic Grieve, the former Attourney General made it clear that the people are subservient to the Queen and Parliament.
But by what right does the Queen rule over us? The Crowns of the United Kingdom owe nothing to the democratic will of the people they were taken by force. As for this Queen, even if one accepts the principle of hereditary monarchy, her family came to power by usurpation of the legitimate king, the Crown under which the Kingdoms were united was not hers, although her usurping ancestors united the Parliaments.
The Queen’s right to rule comes from her ancestors’ theft of the reigns of power from those who in turn stole it by force from their predecessors at least one of whom was buried under a carpark in Leicester. Her rule does not depend on right, or justice it depends on force. Neither does much of the ownership of land, wealth and property in this country rest on any sort of right or justice. In Scotland the great estates were the outcome of the clan lands being conferred on the clan chief when enobled by the king in a move to bring the country into conformity with European models. The great estates south of the border were conferred on their followers by whichever king they supported at whichever time they supported him, the people who worked the land were little better than slaves transferred from one lord to another. And of course our banks and industries were built upon slavery and not upon any sort of honest or moral foundation. The only right the Queen, our landowners, industrialists and bankers have to their property is that of possession.
The majority of people own only themselves and their labour, but this government wants to remove from the worker even the ownership of his own body by effectively denying him the right to withold his labour in protest against unjust working conditions. Our industries were built on slavery and the Conservative government wants them to return to slavery. The worker who puts into a company is as deserving of the produce of that company as the heir of slavery who invests in the company as his forbears invested in slavery. No, the worker is more deserving because what he contributes is his own not stolen from others, his body, his own labour, unlike the product of exploitation or usury provided by the investors.
The British have been whipped so long into submission that they believe they must be slaves, those who are supposed to represent them refuse to oppose the burden of austerity laid upon them, choosing rather to accept the lies of slavers in return for their comfortable Westminster sinecures. British workers have a choice and they must make it for themselves; will they bow the knee to the Tory descendents of slave owners and expropriators of wealth and remain slaves themselves, or will they take back the country which is theirs by right of birth or adoption, but above all by right of participation? They are no lesser men than the bankers and businessmen who exploit them, they are no lesser men than the parliamentarians who abuse them, there is not one Briton who is in any way inferior to the Royalty artificially raised over them. This country belongs to its people and its people should take it back!
Filed under: Justice, Scotland, success | Tags: democracy, freedom, Glasgow, integrity, justice, Mandela, Nelson Mandela, respect, Scotland
I was late to bed last night or, rather, this morning. The nonstop coverage of Nelson Mandela’s passing held me like a rabbit in the headlights, a sort of compulsive sadness. I remember that day in 1990, glued to the television, waiting to see Mandela walk free, the commentators trying to fill in the delay with talk, hoping nothing had gone wrong and then the tears when we finally saw him. Neelam and I went down to Nelson Mandela Place to celebrate; two of our friends had named their son “Mandela”, the little fellow was most confused as so many people asked him, “Mandela, what’s it like to be free?” We’re a funny lot in Glasgow!
Even more than watching Mandela walk free, more than his inauguration, the thing that moved me was the sight of the queues waiting to vote in the elections of 1994, particularly one old woman picked up by the television cameras who had waited in line for more than a day to vote for the first time in her life. In April 1994 this black woman became a citizen of her own country, a human being in her own right. It brought home to me just how precious is our right to vote. It saddens me that people don’t use their vote, they don’t realise how dearly it has been won. The ordinary people of Scotland have never been consulted on whether they want to be part of the United Kingdom, next year, at last, we have our say; whether you oppose independence or whether you want to see Scotland free, it is important to vote. Democracy is too precious to squander, we have the opportunity to bring meaningful democracy to Scotland, we must use it.
Nelson Mandela holds up an ideal of leadership to the world. His example is a rebuke to our politicians because it shows that a politician can serve the people, a politician need not be self serving and greedy. Nelson Mandela holds up a promise of the possibility of integrity in politics and mutual respect between people of different opinions. Today we remember and celebrate Nelson Mandela and his contribution to our lives. Tomorrow we go forward to build the future and a fitting legacy for Nelson Mandela.
Filed under: Justice, Politics, Scotland | Tags: Christianity, Islam, Jesus, justice, Muslims, peace
Now that I’ve got your attention, I have to wonder at the ill feeling that Muslims provoke in so many of our people. My next door neighbours are Muslims. my friend Mr Arshad brought his children up well and in turn their children are delightful, I am happy that my grandchildren play with them because they are models of good manners in a country that has forgotten how to behave. Indeed I have to say that,
with one exception, I have always been treated by Muslims with the utmost courtesy.
People say that Islam oppresses women, in truth some Muslims oppress women, but as a generalization it is no more valid than, Catholic clergy sexually abuse children, only some do. Westerners see the Hijab as a sign of oppression, but when I look at my neighbours I note that some wear the Hijab and some don’t, it doesn’t appear to cause strife among them. There was a time when the rights and protections given to Muslim women far exceeded those of Western women and what we may now see as oppressive was once very progressive. Even now we have cases of primogeniture being challenged in court whereas Muslim women have always had inheritance rights to ensure bereavement would not leave them penniless. For many centuries many Muslim women had economic power and Muslim girls were educated when it was unusual for women to be educated. If women in some Muslim countries have restricted rights it is probably due more to sexism than Islam, and sexism is hardly an exclusively Muslim trait.
Muslims are often portrayed as the enemies of Western culture, however, were it not for Islam, the foundations of our culture would have been lost to us. It was Christians who burned the library at Alexandria, it was Muslims who preserved classical texts while Christians were burning books, it was only European trade with Muslim nations that allowed our scholars to access the texts that fuelled the Renaissance. It was Muslims who brought the Hindu Zero to the west and made our mathematics and science possible. Muslims were also responsible for lifting western medicine out of superstition and blood letting.
It is significant that the Muslim greeting translates as ‘Peace to you” and that rather than praise the Prophet’s name they wish peace upon him. Islam is essentially a religion of peace, in Islam war is only allowed in self defence and it is estimated that only a few hundred died in all Mohammed’s campaigns. Violence is no more integral to Islam than it is to Christianity. A few years ago Karen Armstrong wrote a good article in Time Magazine on Islam and peace.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,175987,00.html
I suspect that ifJesus were in the west today, when asked, “Who is my neighbour?” The story he told in reply would, instead of, “But a Samaritan was going” be phrased, “a Muslim was going” because, make no mistake, Muslims are our neighbours.
Unless we learn to respect our neighbours as ourselves, we will condemn both them and us to lives of conflict and fear. There is a saying, popular in the USA, “What would Jesus do?” You may be sure he would seek peace, and when people raised their voices against Muslims he would reply, “let the one without sin cast the first stone” or perhaps, “take first the beam from your own eye”. Compare our histories, look at our society with it’s crime and debauchery and corruption, Islamic societies may be no better than ours, but can we say they are worse? Isn’t it time we learned to work together to heal the wounds of the world, to work from shared values of peace and justice, rather than perpetuating fear and misunderstanding?
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