Alternative Votes And the Three-Legged Race

As a child I was energetic enough, wiry and fit, but team and competitive sports didn't, and still don't particularly interest me. Sitting on the side-lines watching a cricket match in the comfortingly warm sun of a late summer's afternoon was activity enough for me, even though I didn't understand cricket. Alternatively, perhaps a sauntering walk to a favourite spot beneath the shade of an old oak where I could sit with a book and sense the evening creeping up on the world to envelope us all in night-time’s comforting blanket.

Come sports day, of course, every effort would be made to ensure no one felt left out, it never occurring to anyone that a person might simply dream of being left out. Consequently, we timid touchline layabouts were drafted into some games considered so easy that anyone could play. Quoits, the sack race, different versions of the egg-and-spoon race, throwing bean bags about and, of course, the three-legged race.

Two children would be tethered together at the ankle and, incredible as it may seem, were expected to run towards a finish line such that they would prove the acme of triumph in co-operation. Of course, the true intent of those into whose charge our innocent parents had entrusted us soon became apparent as a series of stumbles, falls and tearful cross words met with peals of uncontrollable laughter from the side of the track where, if there was any justice, I would have been sitting during this three-legged farce.

You never saw the much celebrated top athletes of the school taking part in this absurd buffoonery and for good reason. Athletes are fiercely competitive and the last thing one needs is to be hobbled by some spotty Herbert with a flare for sonnets and coming in last. The school athletes would compete on their own terms and just as well or who would play the games at whose side-lines I might sit and dream?

On May 5^th UK citizens are being asked to vote on electoral reform, on whether to replace the first past the post system currently used in general elections with the alternative voting system. Make no mistake, this is important because it will determine the method and outcomes of all future elections; You can find out more from the Electoral Reform Society.

Who gains from this reform? We are led to believe that the voter will benefit because his or her vote will have a greater chance to count but I have serious doubts. Do we really want a three-legged government, with two (or, heaven forfend, maybe more) parties tethered together in a forced marriage hobbling down the track, stumbling, falling and uttering increasingly louder complaints about how unfair it all is that this or that party's agenda is being subsumed by the other?

What would that look like? Well, you only have to look at the growing resentments at the grass roots of the current coalition government. There is a sense that the Tory party is being hobbled by its farcical partnership with the bookish Liberal milksops while the liberals hear this government routinely referred to as Tory because no one believes the Liberal party is in any way setting the agenda for change and governance.

There is no illusion about which party in this three-legged race is the athlete and which dragged from the touchline to run a race in which they never expected to be entered. The liberals have not been in government for almost 100 years and I can't help think this is because not that many people want a Liberal government and perhaps we should consider the possibility that the current system works very well in that it has recognised that fact. Maybe the alternative voting system is going to give us what we have consistently rejected for almost a century, a Liberal government.

Back on my schools sports fields if anyone had suggested reforming sport so that someone who came in behind the winner, the first past the post, might still take the trophy would have been laughed to derision. If anyone had suggested the athlete coming in first, having trained long and hard all year, should share the glory with another who has been consistently rejected for the team would have been considered mad. The also rans and the three-legged hobbledehoys were expected to be good losers and if it didn't suit them to lose urged to make a greater effort next year.

In the race of life there are winners and losers and coming in last is a mighty clue to the fact that you didn't try hard enough. Maybe the Liberal school report should read, “Must try harder next time.”

BBC News - Councils defeat government over school buildings

A Tory turns out to be a law-breaker; well who would have thought. Of course, this is typical of the party that considers itself the natural party of government. Just as Mubarak is driven from office after 30 years of emergency laws and phony elections the Tories are shown to be pressing ahead with their idealism-based reform without consulting anyone. The arrogance and flagrant disregard for people is to be expected but surely not to be tolerated.

“The education secretary's decision to axe Buildings Schools for the Future (BSF) projects in six local authority areas was ruled unlawful as he failed to consult on it.”

BBC News - Councils defeat government over school buildings

BBC News - Cameron hails 'revolutionary' Whitehall data website

Following plans to make the unemployed work at menial tasks for £1 an hour the government is now planning to hand over the auditing of the civil service to – well, you and me. Ironically, it is the unemployed who might be best placed for time to do this job.

Funny, but when I put my cross next to my candidate of choice at the last election I was convinced I was helping to build a government that would do the job. It seems that while they are dead keen that all the people they are planning to put out of work should find a job, even if it is for £1 an hour, they themselves seem curiously workshy.

David Cameron announced a new age of transparency, when ordinary people will be able to check on whether the government is keeping to the pledges it has made. Maybe he should look closer to home. He is already in government with Nick Clegg and the LibDems who have broken almost every pledge they made before the election.

BBC News - Cameron hails 'revolutionary' Whitehall data website

Exclusive: The Breathless Celts

With the new Condem alliance threatening cuts of between 25% and 40% across the board and in all departments this column can exclusively reveal how the regions, and especially the peripheral, Celtic nations of the UK will carry the brunt of those cuts.

A  leaked document today reveals that the North of England will be closed from Friday to Monday, while the Midlands will close early on Tuesdays and Fridays. Regions further south will remain open, but will see a ban on every mode of transport except walking and piggy backs. Residents across the UK are encouraged to go to bed early, especially as the days get shorter, to save on electricity. The Home Counties are under review, although there are no plans for any such radical money-saving measures because that’s where David Cameron lives.

But in a move that some commentators say makes Margaret Thatcher look like a socialist citizens of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are being asked to hold their breath when there is an ‘R’ in the month. The leaked document reveals the government’s concern that there isn’t enough air to go around after MPs have debated the issue. Other ideas for making such savings include restricting women to only breathing out, an idea that was rejected when someone pointed out that most women can talk breathing in, a feat of multitasking considered vital to the nation.

A member of the Welsh Assembly, when asked to comment, said that policies were still under consideration and everyone was holding their breath in anticipation of official announcements. “After all”, she observed, “we might need the practice.”

Christian preacher arrested by homosexual police officer for saying that homosexuality is a sin - CCFON.org - Christian Concern For Our Nation

Gays in uniform are now taking the law into their own hands. It is not enough that they are legal, they have to make anyone and everyone who disagrees with them illegal. They as fascist as any right-wing movement that defames and condemns them. Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens wrote:

‘The Public Order Act of 1986 was not meant to permit the arrest of Christian preachers in English towns for quoting from the Bible.  But it has.  The Civil Partnerships Act 2004 was not meant to force public servants to approve of homosexuality.  But it has.

‘The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 was not meant to lead to a state of affairs where it is increasingly dangerous to say anything critical about homosexuality.  But it did.

‘And the laws of Britain, being entirely based upon the Christian Bible, were not meant to be used by a sneering judge to declare that Christianity had no higher status in this ancient Christian civilisation than Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism.

‘But it has come to that this week,’ he wrote.

‘We have travelled in almost no time from repression, through a brief moment of mutual tolerance, to a new repression.  And at the same time, the freedom of Christians to follow their beliefs in workplaces is under aggressive attack.’

Christian preacher arrested by homosexual police officer for saying that homosexuality is a sin - CCFON.org - Christian Concern For Our Nation

Life on Mars and PC Tact

“My name is Sam Tyler. I had an accident and I woke up in 1973. Am I mad, or in a comma, or back in time?” So says the voice of Sam Tyler, a 21st Century police officer, over the opening credits of the hit BBC TV drama series Life on Mars, first broadcast in January 2006. It ran to two series and was such a phenomenon it was followed up by another series, Ashes to Ashes, featuring another character, Alex Drake, this time thrown back to 1983 as the result of being shot in the line of duty.

Both meet the same characters “back then” and both suffer culture shock as they have to adapt not just to the more primitive policing methods but the customs and idiom of those very different times. Both series are packed with politically incorrect dialogue and assumptions as we follow the very un-PC Detective Inspector Gene Hunt and his team  in their efforts to keep the streets safe.

You can sympathise with the main characters’ impatience with and attempts at correcting unreformed police officers who call a deaf boy a “spastic”, who regard WPCs as being there to make the tea and be leered at, who make gags at the expense of black people and homosexuals and who regard criminals as deserving of “a good kicking.” Thank goodness for most of us the world isn’t like that anymore. But is it any better?

If roles were reversed and DI Gene Hunt were to wake up in 2010 how would he faire? Of course, he wouldn’t last five minutes because in that time he would have broken just about every anti-discrimination law in the country, not to mention health and safety. But what would he think of a world where a question from a pensioner about immigration becomes an international news story?

Where we allow our society to be slowly colonised by Muslims at the same time as we are at war with Muslim countries and Muslims are becoming suicide bombers on our streets – and we are not even allowed to talk about it for fear of being labelled Islamophobic?

What would he think of the proliferation of mosques across the country when young Muslims are being radicalised in some of those same mosques? Of the rise in popularity of the BNP and the real and frankly frightening prospect of Nick Griffin getting a seat in the British parliament and all because no one else is prepared to talk about the problems of immigration and he cashes in on that fact?

What would Gene Hunt make of a Britain where our libel laws are so wacky that “libel tourism” has become a major problem and Eastern European as well as other criminals, businessmen and politicians are flocking to our shores to sue investigative journalists who are getting too close to the facts? Where a journalist is guilty until proven innocent? Where foreign criminals are enslaving girls and running them as sex slaves in our towns and streets?

What would he make of a country where broadcast news is no longer news but tittle-tattle and gossip. Where the cult of celebrity puts no-talent nobodies on the front pages of our newspapers? Where news broadcasters do pieces to camera while the main event goes on behind them because they believe their comment and opinion is more valuable than those of the people who actually run the country, its businesses and services?

What would Gene Hunt think of a country where we are policed at a distance by cameras and are now the most scrutinised society after China and Russia? Where teachers run the real risk of being physically attacked, maligned on social networking sites, accused of abuse and little or nothing to be done because we are currently in the grip of the cult of the child? Where having a baby is regarded by some as a career move and others as an occupational hazard? Where aborting a baby is considered so inconsequential that it is possible to do it in your lunch break, like going for a dump?

How would he faire in this brave new world where we are all so PC, not because it makes for a better world but because of some misplaced guilt over our patriarchal history of empire that makes us feel we have to be the world’s social worker and “understand” how hard it must be having been our victims? Where we are actually implicated in charges of torture along with our “special friends” and war allies? Where right and wrong are defined not by agreed standards of decency and morality but by who has the money to sue you if you don’t toe the line they draw and dare you to cross, those who cry, “its our world now so have a care how you walk in it or we will have you for dinner!”

There have always been problems and each generation must find its own way to deal with them but the one “solution” that must be avoided like the jaws of hell is the one that insists, like Basil Fawltey, “Don’t mention the war (or immigration, or abortion, or over-surveillance, or Islamification)!” If we can’t express our views, share our fears and hopes, declare our convictions and speak our minds without fear of retribution and the PC brigade then we are storing up problems that may explode in a reaction of violence that we neither want nor can fully realise until it is too late.

George Orwell said, “Liberty is the freedom to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” That liberty is in real danger in Britain and while we are all arguing terms on what terms we can use in public discourse and private conversation there are those with a very different agenda planning our future and that of our children. Maybe we need a Gene Hunt to share with us some well overdue home truths and perhaps it doesn’t matter too much in what terms as long as we face them.

Yes, it is a different world and in some ways the changes are welcome, but is it really a better world? I don’t think so.

Welsh MPs, Gas Bills and Sofa Beds

The big story of the day has been MPs expenses. What a tangled web, as they say. The taxpayer is apparently owed £1.3million, which will come in handy as we try to keep our heads above water having bailed out the banks, spent a fortune bailing out the Americans in their ill-conceived venture in Iraq, and more taxpayer's money soon to be doled out to pay for an election. A full list of who fibbed about what can be found here

But the thing that has been bothering me is not the naked greed of MPs (after all, if they wanted to live with any degree of integrity they would have chosen another career route). What struck me is the almost total lack of ambition on the part of Welsh MPs. While some English MPs have to pay back tens of thousands - Barbara Follett £42,458; Andrew and Julie Kirkbride £60,000; Liam Fox £24,878 - Welsh MPs are mostly paying back pocket money. Check the numbers here

If there is one thing worse than being represented in politics by thieves it is being represented in politics by thieves with no ambition. What "bunce" is out there that we might have enjoyed but they hadn't the imagination or fight to get it for us? For more on the Welsh political scene check out Betsan Powys' blog

Christian hotel owners face ruin after 'defending their faith' in row with a Muslim guest | Mail Online

 It started as a religious discussion over the breakfast table at a private hotel.

Several months later, the Christian owners face ruin after a Muslim guest complained that she had been insulted. Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang are being prosecuted under controversial public order laws designed to target yobbish and abusive behaviour on the streets.

While everyone is making the economy the central issue in the run up to the next election an equally serious issue is going unnoticed; this government’s obsession with policing and micromanaging our lives. This story is a case in point.

A Christian couple who run an hotel in Aintree got involved in a religious discussion with one of their guests, who turned out to be a Muslim lady having treatment in a local hospital. Exchanges were said to be “warm”, the couple insisting they were simply defending their faith against remarks made by the guest. The lady complained to the police and the couple now face a possible £5,000 fine and a police record, as well as losing regular business from the hospital as a result of the incident.

I have to say that if you are running a business that depends on the good will of the public it seems the height of folly to be so forthright in your views as to risk your reputation and damage your livelihood, especially when the woman is a patient in the hospital on which you depend for 80% of your business; you are asking to make her a victim and you a villain. “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” (Proverbs 15:1) I am all for being “fools for Christ” but I don’t see anything in the Christian faith that demands foolishness. That having been said since when was it against the law to be foolish?

The issue here, however, is that the views we hold, the thoughts we have, our right to express them and the common and well-established principle that we all occasionally have to hear things we don’t like without being a girl about it are all under threat. George Orwell observed:

“Liberty is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear”

The thought police don’t agree and, sponsored by the liberal agenda prevalent across parties today, they are all over us like a rash and they are showing an alarming bias.

You remember the story of the woman caught “in the act” of adultery who was brought before Jesus (John 8:3). The question often asked is, if she was caught “in the act” where was the man? In the same way, since this was a “discussion” why is only one party in the dock?

The newspaper reports, “It is alleged they suggested that Mohammad, the founder of Islam, was a warlord when the guest challenged them about their Christian beliefs. The woman also claims that the couple, who vehemently deny the allegations and say they were simply defending their faith, described her traditional dress as a form of bondage.”

She said something, they said something, feelings ran a little high and the thought police ran to the defence of the perceived victim. But there is no victim, only an exchange of views, a disagreement and what used to be called, before the world went mad, “ a bit of an argy-bargy”. In political circles such exchanges, when they occur, are euphemistically labelled “a frank exchange of views”, everyone picks up on the sub text and moves on. Why is religious discussion treated differently?

It is because we live in a secular society and officialdom “can’t be asked” to bring wise and equitable judgement to these situations. In their efforts to achieve a “fair” and liberal society they have developed a vision of the future that sees religion effectively privatised. Influenced by such “fine philosophers” as Dawkins and Hitchens (that was a joke) they feel they can dismiss religion as socially insignificant, even dangerous.

The problem is that, notwithstanding the bad-tempered pronouncements of curmudgeons like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens et al, people have faith and express and practice it in a variety of ways.

Notably, both Islam and Christianity are evangelising religions so trying to privatise religions with declared society impacting intentions, and with those religions making up the greater part of the earth’s population, seems ambitious to say the least. I suppose the default position in that case is to placate the religion that is perceived to pose the greatest threat and oppress the religion that is little more than irritating and and inconvenient.

If these darling liberals are determined to defend the rights of Muslims to live and express their faith, sometimes in very offensive and threatening ways it must be said, they must defend the right of Christians to the same degree, even if they can be foolish about it sometimes.

I have said that both both faiths are evangelising religions but that has not always been true of Islam. In his book From Babel to Dragomans the orientalist Bernard Lewis writes of Islam as a conquering religion observing that:

“In traditional Islamic states, the business of government was carried on by two main groups, known as the men of the sword and the men of the pen. The former were the armed forces, the latter the civilian bureaucrats…the two together were commonly considered to be the twin pillars of the state…The Fatimids, for the first time in Islamic history, added a third – the Mission.”

Note that until the coming of the Fatimids mission was not part of the Islamic state. The Fatimids emerged in Egypt towards the end of the first Millennium (Christian calendar), following in the footsteps of the Abbasids whom they attempted to overthrow, and held that other branches of Islam had gone astray. Believing themselves to be the true heads of pure Islam (why does this sound familiar?), they followed the traditional policy of conquest and subjugation against other Muslim states. But the rest of Islam was bigger and better prepared and they resorted to the novel policy of mission.

It is interesting that one of the complaints made by the guest at the hotel was that the proprietors insisted that Islam’s founding prophet was a warrior. Perhaps not a wise thing to say to a paying Muslim guest who might take offense and her business elsewhere nevertheless quite accurate. Which raises the question, are they being prosecuted at least in part for stating, not a religious conviction, but an irrefutable historical fact? Is the state now insisting on a role in defining what is and what is not legitimate historical reporting?

This all leaves me, and I am sure others, in something of a dilemma when it comes to voting. On the one hand I don’t believe the alternatives to this current government are viable for all sorts of reasons (I might be persuaded otherwise). On the other, I am convinced that something must be done to stop this petty-meddling juggernaut before the freedoms we have for so long taken for granted, that our fathers fought and died to preserve, and that make our country great are totally taken from us.

Christian hotel owners face ruin after 'defending their faith' in row with a Muslim guest | Mail Online

Integrity without God is Hypocrisy

After a week of incredible and breathtaking scandal in the British Parliament and with recriminations flying, calls for resignations, and a mad scramble for the moral high ground I find my thoughts turning to a familiar Bible theme. There are significant parallels it seems to me between the way politicians have been behaving and the conduct of the Pharisees in the New Testament. The problem in each case is the same; “integrity” without God is hypocrisy.

The Pharisees fall into the category of religious and cultural purists fighting against long-standing efforts to reconcile Hebrew religion with Greek philosophy. Aiming for integrity in your faith is a noble thing but it can become religion for religion’s sake and this is what happened to the otherwise noble Pharisees. They defined and enforced their religion to the extreme, hedging it about with endless laws and regulations designed to ensure strict adherence.

This led inevitably to both strange and cruel interpretations and applications of the law as well as widespread abuses. They insisted, for instance, that on the Sabbath a man may spit on rocky ground but not on soft earth because it may make a furrow and that would constitute ploughing. Individuals found technicalities that allowed them to condemn others while excusing themselves. Famously, while the Law of Moses commanded that children should “honour your father and your mother” there was a technicality that allowed a man to absolve himself of any responsibility for his parents by declaring his money and property a gift to the temple. He wouldn’t actually have to part with any property, just pronounce it “Corban” or dedicated and then live off it with the declared intention of one day giving it to the temple and meanwhile no longer bearing any filial responsibility.

Their real problems started when they ran up against the One who gave the Law and found his standards and expectations very different from their own. Jesus made them look bad when they were working so hard to do good as they saw it. In Matthew 12 we see what happened when the ones who interpreted the Law came up against the One who gave the Law.

In this passage we read that, “Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, ‘Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath” To the Pharisees Jesus’ disciples were ‘harvesting’ wheat and thus breaking the Sabbath; to Jesus they were hungry men being practical about meeting their needs. “I desire mercy and not sacrifice” Jesus said.

As Jesus went into the synagogue they seemed to have a man with a withered hand there already set up to entrap him. “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath”, they asked, clearly looking for an excuse to accuse and condemn him on the basis of the law. But Jesus replied, “Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep?” The man was duly healed.

Finally, we see Jesus heal a demon-oppressed blind and mute man. Determined now to not be impressed the Pharisees ascribed the miracle to Satan and accused Jesus of serving Satan. Of course, Jesus response was again perfect reason; if Satan casts out Satan then Satan is divided against himself. What was worse however was their denial of the power of the Holy Spirit, a show of their total opposition now to what Jesus had clearly and consistently demonstrated was of God; the sin against the Holy Spirit.

The aims of the Pharisees were noble, that is, to serve Israel by maintaining a pure religion but their means of achieving this end were heartless, putting their rules before God and the outcome was a disaster because, as Jesus said, their rules demanded sacrifice but allowed no mercy. They sought to serve the God of mercy by becoming a merciless religious regime.

In the same way, our politicians have set out, most of them, with the best of intentions, to serve the community in which they live and represent them in Parliament. However, they have, over generations, drafted rules for themselves that are politically convenient and interpreted without any moral compass but in ways that simply “apply” the rules. This has led to widespread abuse and, like the young man who absolves himself of any responsibility for his parents by “sticking to the rules” of Corban, they too easily declare themselves as acting within the law while ignoring entirely their original purpose to serve the wider community.

Like mercy, morality cannot be legislated; you are either merciful or you are not; either a man or woman of good moral standing or you are not. It depends I suppose on who and what influences you. This week has shown that neither mercy nor morality is ultimately attainable without God. Men and women when left to their own devices might entertain the best of intentions declaring themselves prepared to make any sacrifice to serve the community but without God such intentions and such service will lack both mercy and morality because without God everything is relative and everyone will do what seems right to them at the time.

We should pray for our leaders and for our country that the good and the godly will rise up and demonstrate service that is truly sacrificial and that is informed by both mercy and integrity that can only come from the God who is both merciful and true to his word.