Archive for the ‘Religion & Politics’ Category

Two years on from The Zuck officially announcing that the age of privacy was over, the government are once again on a beeline for another giant step in privacy invasion. The question is though, who is going to stop them?

Probably nobody. In fact, it’s already too late for that. They already track who we send emails and text messages to. They might not have the content of them yet, but they can already see what is going on. So despite the fact that we have freedom of association, and therefore I have every right to be friends with terrorists if I wanted to, chances are none of us would because our the government would then be watching everything we do and our telecommunications providers would have no option but to hand the records over.

So the downward spiral into Nineteen Eighty-Four seems to be well underway. In fact, Cameron doesn’t even need to install telescreens into our homes because as CIA director David Petraeus pointed out last month, we’re installing the gadgets for them.

But even if we did recognise that our freedoms are quickly being eroded, who is actually going to stand up against it? The answer is probably very few of us. Because ultimately, privacy is something that you can live your life without.

Of course, nobody wants to, and the visions from Nineteen Eighty-Four are horrific, but a slow, gradual erosion of our liberties isn’t going to affect our lives too much and unless we’re going to look at the bigger picture, it will be reasonably easy to swallow. I mean, the government already tracks all the messages we send and receive and watches us on CCTV on all the roads and city centres already. But we all accept that now.

Motiving yourself to get and there and do something about the bigger picture is never easy because there is little motivation to take care of it now. Not to mention that the government has got us so scared of terrorism that we openly invite many of the security measures put in place – just look at what Bush managed to push out in the Patriot Act.

Day to day, the invasion of privacy is just a purely intellectual exercise – we have nothing illegal to hide, it’s only the terrorists who need to be worried. Of course, we would prefer to have privacy, but it isn’t like we need it to go about our lawful lives.

Furthermore, what can you really do about it anyway? Chances are it will never feel like we’re now at the line that we must draw and go no further – it will continue slowly and gradually. Much like the slow ticking of the evolution clock, there is no definitive cut-off between here and Nazi Germany.

Indeed, we have many of the tools to do it now. You can route all your internet traffic via an anonymous proxy. But almost nobody does. It’s just too much effort. That’s the problem – it will simply be easier to just swallow the erosion of our civil liberties than it will to fight the fight. So where do we go from here?

It’s a hard life being a petrol tanker driver. Having to struggle by on an average salary of £45,000 a year. How do they cope?

Actually, as a result of finding out how much they rake in, I’m thinking about suggesting to Elina that she retrains in HGV driving as there seems to be far more money in it than translating, not to mention an ever widening variety of role models such as Lisa Kelly.

Anyway, onto the real topic. It’s easy to say that the mini-crisis we recently experienced was caused by politicians. It is easy to say this, because it mainly was. What is a ridiculous thing to say, everyone should panic and start storing fuel in jerry cans.

But to let the media off would be short sighted. Even the BBC for example where jumping on the bandwagon (or should I say tanker) with a count of how much extra money the petrol companies were making out of the increase in petrol sales.

That doesn’t make any sense. Why would people by more petrol overall? Surely they would just ensure their cars are filed up, but they wouldn’t burn more petrol, so they wouldn’t buy more in the long run. If anything they will look to conserve fuel, and therefore will actually cost petrol companies money.

One topic that often comes up in discussions is regarding how big Leeds is. So I thought I would clarify the situation, by pointing out that we are in fact the second biggest city in the UK.

Leeds now has a population of 810,200. That isn’t the West Yorkshire Urban Area which includes all the surrounding towns, of which the population is 1,499,465. So we’re not talking about Greater Leeds if you will, just Leeds.

Compare this to Glasgow, which has a population of 629,501, or Manchester, which has a population of 394,269. Of course, Greater Manchester has over two million people, but as we’ve already discussed, we’re not including surrounding towns.

Only one city can out-match us for population – and that is Birmingham, with a population of 970,892.

What of that London place you say? Why the City of London is only a square mile, and has a population of 11,700.

A proposal by the government to introduce regional variation in public sector pay has been greatly discussed in recent times. The idea is that because the cost of living is more expensive in one place and less expensive in others, pay should variety to reflect that.

Having listened to the arguments on Question Time last Thursday, one of the suggestions was that, taking teachers as an example, the areas which have higher pay would then become magnets for the best teachers and other areas would be left with lower standards.

This completely misses the argument that the cost of living is different and therefore the pay would simply reflect this – in actual fact, it is the lack of regional variation should cause such a problem – if you get paid the same but your cost of living is cheaper, your effective pay is currently higher in the North East than it is in London.

However, I don’t support regional pay variation for that reason.

I’m going to use London as an example here, but in reality London could be replaced by any other big city. Indeed, London is perhaps not the best example given a divide in pay already exists in the form of London weighting. But given its relative size to other places in the UK, I’m going to proceed none the less.

Whether you truly believe there is a strong North South divide or not, it is hard to deny that as a country, we are very London centric. Not to the extent of other countries (Helsinki in Finland for example), but the best jobs, the biggest companies, museums, theaters, events, etc, etc are almost always bigger and better in London.

It then becomes self propelled – the big cities become more attractive places to live as they grow and grow, adding more exciting attractions, therefore attracting more people, and the cycle goes on.

London in itself is attractive enough to bring in talent in the public sector, and therefore we don’t need to offer people a pay packet which is effectively equivalent to those in other areas. To maintain a balance between the biggest cities and the rest of the country, we actually want to pay people more for not living in these places, which are attractive enough already.

This week, George Osbourne rolled out The Budget. Norm described it as a budget he found “impossible to get angry about.” But I disagree.

The increase in the personal tax allowance is great, thumbs up there, well, on the most part. I’m not too bothered by the granny tax either, as state pensions have in fact gone up quite considerably in a time when many working people’s pay have been frozen despite the ever marching climb of inflation. Not to mention is that all that is happening is that their personal allowance is being lowered to match that of working people.

However, when it comes to the top tax bracket, it is nothing moe than a traditional Tory budget. There is little justification for giving 14,000 millionaires a tax break given the financial crisis we are in.

One of the clearest messages we have received from this government is that the previous one has left them with a huge hole in the budget and that strong austerity measures would need to be put in place. So, if it so important to plug the hole in the budget and pay back some of our borrowing, how can we afford to give tax breaks to the rich?

While listening to the radio this morning, I heard that some councils are planning to place restrictions on fundraisers. I’m very much in favour of this, so I write to my local councillor to voice my support.

Dear Elizabeth,

I am a resident living in your ward. As you may have heard, several city councils have proposed restrictions on “chuggers” raising money for charities on the street. I am writing to you to voice my support for similar restrictions in Leeds.

I walk though town on a regular basis and often feel like I am “running the gauntlet” as I walk up and down Briggate or Lands Lane only to have people madly waving their arms at me and block my path.

Worse still, as a trustee of a local charity based here in Leeds, I am familiar with the industry and know that these people are almost always professional fund raisers that are primarily funding their own salaries, and taking money away from local charitable causes. This to me seems dishonest, as when people give to charity, they expect that money to actually end up in the charities pocket.

Therefore, given they provide benefit to neither charities nor residents, I would strongly support any move to reduce this nuisance.

Yours sincerely,
Chris Worfolk

I would encourage you all to do the same.

Recently, there has been quite a lot of discussion around the subject of adoption. People stand in horror that the adoption process is being sped up so that we can match children to adoptive parents in a quicker amount of time.

The phrase you hear most often is that “we need to make sure that perspective parents are suitable.”

But is that really true? I’m going to suggest not.

The reason is, we don’t actually need adoptive parents to be that suitable. Of course if they are brilliant perspective parents then that is fantastic news, but I think we need to take a more pragmatic approach to the whole situation.

After all, these are kids who are usually in care homes. So the question isn’t are we placing them with suitable people, it’s whether we are placing them we a couple who would be at minimum more suitable than living in a care home.

We know that a care home isn’t a good environment to bring a child up in, we’ve done the research and statically it doesn’t end as well. So the question then becomes, what exactly would be the harm in having a more relaxed attitude to adoption?

I recently returned from Paris (I’m not bragging or anything), and one thing I noticed was that I only saw two people wearing the hijab (Islamic headscarf) the whole time I was there (four days). I saw nobody wearing a burka either, though that is to be expected given it is now illegal in France.

One explanation for this could be that there are simply very few Muslims in Paris, but given the multicultural nature of any large capitol, that seems unlikely. A more likely explanation, at least if I was to take an educated guess, is that the French have managed to create a society in which is the Islamic community does not feel oppressed (and therefore needs cultural signifiers such as head scarves) and is able to integrate. Perhaps we’ve simply got it very wrong in the UK, and the segregation many communities are seeing, is the result.

As you’ve probably heard about Dereck Chisora and David Haye recently came to blows during a press conference in Munich.

Officials and commentators have called it a disgrace to the sport of boxing and suggested that the two boxers should be given life time bans – not to mention that the police might want to get involved.

But actually, it isn’t a disgrace. What is a disgrace, is that in this day and age, we as a society, still condone the idea of two men getting into a ring together and knocking the shit out of each other until one goes down to the count.

Surely incidents such as this show us what is wrong with boxing as a general concept? Two men beat each other unconscious outside of the ring and it’s a criminal offence – but do it inside a ring and you’re a world champion! How does that make sense? No wonder these guys have a bit of a punch up at a press conference when there how life is based around violence.

Of course, the libertarian view is that if two people choose to get into a ring and beat each other half to death, then they should be allowed to. But that doesn’t mean we should be condoning it as a society – being racist for example is legal; the way we control it is to condem it as a society. Why should boxing receive a special exception?

Ultimately, we can only hope that boxing will go the way of Fox Hunting – we’ll come to the realisation that it probably isn’t the best idea to let two men tear into each other until one of them lies a bruised mess on the floor.

Recently, I attended a debate at Nottingham Trent University, as part of their Islamic Society’s Discover Islam Week.

The event itself was held in a lecture theatre in the Newton Building, which reminds me a lot of the building that holds the student union at University of Bradford – very new money, wide open spaces, etc.

There was a clear division between the sexes in the room – the front eight rows were reserved for males, and the back three reserved for females. They even had separate entrances too – to the point where we were about to go in the top entrance, but had to turn around at the door and go round the building lobby and down some stairs to go in the bottom entrance instead.

As ever with such events, people are going to be walking out of the room with the exact same views as they walked into the room, so decided a slightly different tact was necessary.

I was asked to speak first, which seemed very strange for a debate in which I was the opposition, but it fitted in quite well with what I had written, so I thought I would just roll with it. My speech focused less on rebutting the proposition, which was nothing more than the cosmological argument anyway, and more about offering an alternative explanation for religion.

Unfortunately, not being a philosopher, the rebuttals I did do against the argument were not overly eloquent – though I did get in the core points that it was a case of special pleading, identity of the first cause and attacking the idea that infinite doesn’t exist, though not being able to accurately put why Hilbert had been misquoted let my argument down.

Never the less, it was always going to be a tough task going into the lion’s den if you will, so I was only a little disappointed with my performance.

I also found it rather strange that they finished the event with a video from Siria. Not not a humanitarian appeal which I presumed it would be when they first announced they would be showing a video. Rather, it was footage from a mass rally in which a speaker was telling the gathered mass how Allah would crush their enemies as people chanted his name. I’m relucant to envoke Godwin’s Law and describe it to something that would not be out of place at a Goebbels rally, but then I would only be returning the favour ;).

In any case, I was an enjoyable event and I would like to thank Nottingham Trent University Islamic Society for their hospitality.