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All posts for the month April, 2013

Qatada Gets Harder

Posted by ukvillafan on April 24, 2013
Posted in: Freedom of Expression, Politics, Religion. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

Abu Qatada would not necessarily be on my list of favourite dinner invitees. I’m only guessing, but I suspect his conversation may well be quite one-dimensional. Of course, his curfew would make it impossible, unless we made it Sunday lunch. In any event, I’d probably get more out of an evening with his lawyers.

That may be a little unfair, though, as he might well turn out to be an engaging and interesting conversationalist. I could, perhaps, invite him to discuss all of the criminal offences he is alleged to have committed whilst in the UK. Sadly, that wouldn’t take too long because neither he nor I have any idea what offences, if any, he could be charged with here.

The problem the government has with Qatada is that the country it wants to deport him to, Jordan, has a serious history of torture. In particular, the conviction of Qatada (in his absence} was obtained using the confessions of his tortured co-defendants. We have rather a fabulous principle in this country – confessions through torture are inadmissible as evidence. We also signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, which also has something to say about torture and inhuman and degrading treatment. Perhaps the Home Secretary might make better decisions if she were to bear these things in mind.

Of course, actions speak louder than words, as the cliché goes. Our own relationship to regimes that use torture is far from simple; the government’s complicity with the policy of ‘extraordinary rendition’ shows this. So perhaps it should not be surprising that the main bone of contention for many Tories is the human rights issue itself.

There have been countless calls, from backbenchers and ministers, for the Human Rights Act to be scrapped because it is not achieving its objective. For those politicians, presumably, its objective is to protect the human rights of individuals only provided it doesn’t interfere with the government’s agenda.

In effect, the main thing the Human Rights Act 1998 does is to enable the British public to make claims based on the European Convention on Human Rights in British courts rather than having to go to the time, trouble and expense of making an application to the European Court of Human Rights. The actual ‘rights’ that are protected stem from the Convention, which has nothing to do with the EU and dates from 1951, and not from the modern act of parliament.

In essence, the Convention seeks to protect the rights of individuals against the power of the state and the Act makes it easier to seek that protection for the ‘person in the street’. No wonder politicians do not like the combined effect. Whenever you hear a politician complain about the Human Rights Act, bear in mind that what they are really saying is they fear the power of the individual interfering with the power of the state.

Biting The Hand That Feeds

Posted by ukvillafan on April 21, 2013
Posted in: Football, Liverpool, Politics, Sport. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Inevitably, at some point, one of these posts was going to be about football. I had not planned on it being quite so soon – after all, it is easy to forget that not everyone is a mad sports fan and mostly, this blog is broadly political. The events of today, however, make blogging almost compulsory.

Over the next day or so, even the die-hard sport hater will do well, at least in the UK, to avoid the latest Luis Suarez story. It will be across the back pages of every tabloid tomorrow morning and will not be ignored by the broad sheets. It will remain a permanent feature on Sky Sports for hours, days even, and will be the major talking point on sports radio stations. It will be covered worldwide – just put ‘Suarez bite’ into a search engine to see what I mean.

For those who have not heard, following a ‘coming together’ in Chelsea’s penalty box, Luis Suarez is clearly seen sinking his teeth into the arm of Branislav Ivanovic. It’s not an ‘alleged’ bite; there is no need to worry about the possibility of a claim that the TV footage is misleading. Suarez has issued an apology.

We have heard in recent days that top flight clubs spend about two-thirds of their income on players’ wages. At the same time, some clubs have been seeking internship candidates to work for nothing – not even expenses! Many clubs have been bought by foreign investors and the finances of the top tier of the game have been transformed by television money. In essence, football has been ‘Thatcherised’ – removed from its community heritage and placed firmly in the hands of the money men.

This is relevant because Suarez, a Liverpool player, is an exceptional footballing talent. He is the club’s top goal-scorer this season and is probably Liverpool’s most valuable playing asset. Under normal circumstances, irrespective of any retrospective action that might be taken by the Football Association, the real question is will Liverpool have the mettle to do the right thing?

Liverpool Football Club is known throughout the world. It has standing. It likes to portray an image. In order to protect this image it should let Suarez go, sack him or demote him to the reserves for a season at the very least. It’s not like this is his first offence. He has received a ban previously, in Holland, for biting an opponent and another whilst a Liverpool player for racially abusing Patrice Evra a black French star at Manchester United. He clearly doesn’t learn.

Doing the correct thing by sacking Suarez will be exceptionally expensive. Liverpool FC is likely not to do it. Any other employee caught behaving this way – and more than once – would be summarily dismissed. But football has its own rules, its own way of working, its own morality. The most that is likely to happen is that Liverpool will offload Suarez be selling him. Money will be the determining factor. I hope I’m wrong.

A Day For The Ladies

Posted by ukvillafan on April 21, 2013
Posted in: Feminism, Politics. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

May 31st 2013 is Ladies’ Day at Epsom. It is the day before the Derby, that most prestigious of flat races. There will be hats, and plenty of them. There will also be experts casting their eyes over a plethora of fashion successes and failures. Yes, the people who want to tell us what we should and should not be wearing will be sharpening those knives as I’m writing this, preparing to denigrate some poor woman’s choice of colour, material, style or all three.

Often it will be a member of the royal family who grabs the unwelcome headlines. Two years ago at the wedding (you know, THE wedding) it was the princesses of York, Beatrice and Eugenie, who came under the scrutiny of the fashion police. Now, I am no royalist, quite the contrary, but is that all there is that really matters about them, how they look? Is that what the members of the WSPU envisaged as being where their activism would lead?

The WSPU? Surely you haven’t forgotten? It has not been that long, really! What if I were to mention the name Pankhurst? Now, that IS a name that is remembered.

The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU for short) was founded in 1903 by the well-known Emmeline Pankhurst and others in Manchester. This year, there is an associated centenary, not related directly to Pankhurst, but most definitely connected with Epsom.

June 4th 1913 is not a date that immediately calls a specific event to the mind of the average person, male or female. The incident that occurred that day, however, is well-known. It was Derby day. The King had a horse running. Remember now? Of course you do – a woman, a member of the WSPU, a ‘suffragette’, ran out in front of the King’s horse and was hit by it. She died a few days later. I’ll give you a few moments to see if you know her name.

On the day of the 1911 census she hid in the Houses of Parliament so that when asked, for the purposes of the census, she could give Parliament as her address! She had previously been sent to prison for the crime of throwing rocks at the carriage of Lloyd George. She was sentenced to 1 month’s hard labour. The organisation itself was very active, concentrating on ‘deeds, not words’ to get their points across. This included arson and bombings. Today, they would be called ‘terrorists’.

Will Epsom be marking this event in any way? If so, will it be a spectacular celebration of a determined, principled woman who gave her life for a just cause? Will there be a fanfare? A parade? Will we see jockeys in green, white and violet silks? I doubt it. Perhaps you should write and ask, or write to the BBC or contact Clare Balding?

You should remember her name. She was Emily Wilding Davison.

Why Turkey Does Not Belong In The European Union

Posted by ukvillafan on April 20, 2013
Posted in: Freedom of Expression, Politics, Religion. Tagged: , , , , . 8 Comments

The Guardian has reported this week, in its online version, on the conviction of Turkish pianist and composer Fazil Say for blasphemy on Twitter. The ‘crime’ involved posts allegedly denigrating Islam. In some posts he was repeating poetry penned by Omar Khayyám.

Say is not the only artist to suffer at the hands of Islam in Turkey and, as the Guardian piece points out, the country’s current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was imprisoned in 1998 for ‘inciting religious hatred’.

Turkey is, unusually, an Islamic country with a secular constitution. Inevitably, this creates tension as the religious fundamentalists, who happen to be Islamic in this case, have a clear, burning need to turn the country into a theocracy. This is the agenda of fundies across the world, so it would be a mistake to see this as simply a problem unique to Islam. Religion, more accurately, organised religion, sees itself as the moral arbiter within, and indeed, outside the borders of the particular state in question.

There has been a campaign over recent years at United Nations level to introduce a worldwide ‘protection’ against the denigration of religion generally. This has been promulgated by various Islamic states but it reflects a cross-religious view that it is somehow wrong, ‘disrespectful’ even, to be critical of religion. Amongst various tactics used in this process is the promotion of the idea that to castigate Islam, for example, is somehow ‘Islamaphobic’. Islamaphobia is an invention with no real substance. It is an attempt to accord an ‘idea’, Islam, the benefit accorded to individuals who are subjected to hatred and intolerance.

It is people who need protection in hate-filled circumstances, not ideas. The right to criticise, denigrate, ridicule or disrespect an idea, including a religious one, is fundamental to the concept of freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Ironically, it is those who shout the loudest about disrespect to religion that support, tolerate or participate in heinous acts of hatred. It isn’t atheists and free-thinkers, generally, who fly planes into skyscrapers, bomb marathons, murder doctors who carry out abortions or demand the beheading of infidels.

A state that is willing to allow individuals to be prosecuted for being disrespectful to ideas, religious or otherwise, is not one that should be allowed at the European table.

Thoughts on a Funeral

Posted by ukvillafan on April 16, 2013
Posted in: Politics. Tagged: , , , , . 1 Comment

Tomorrow sees the funeral of Baroness Thatcher. I will not be attending. To be fair, I have not received a formal invitation, so I do not feel as if I am being too rude. However, it does seem like I will be receiving an invoice!

Trawling through the web since Monday, 8th April 2013, a date many will never forget, the average user would have been able to discover many a comment relating to Thatcher’s passing. Her death has been an event as polarising as her premiership. She was a woman you either loved or hated, it appears, in death as much as during her lifetime. Me, I didn’t like her all that much!

Her major success, we are told, was the Falklands war, standiing up to those dirty, annoying Argies who tried to steal OUR land. Quite apart from the rather ludicrous notion that the UK should retain any legitimate claim to a group of rocks nearly 8,000 miles away (Port Stanley is closer to Sydney than it is to London) it seems to have been forgotten, conveniently, that it was the removal of British naval forces from the area that emboldened the Argentinian military junta. A move that the government was warned, specifically, might be interpreted as an encouragement to invasion. The Falklands war stands as a testament to failure, not success. Lives were lost as a result of a catastrophic policy failure, lives that should never have been lost at all.

This callous disregard for human suffering is what I will remember Thatcher for. It was evident in her treatment of the mining communities of the country. It may be that some structural changes were required, but Thatcher’s approach was calculated to wreak havoc and it succeeded.

Thatcher changed this country, of that there is no doubt. Her legacy is manifest.

We have a housing crisis. Thatcher’s government, in a sordid attempt to ‘make more Tories’, sold off the nation’s stock of council housing, at a huge discount, and prevented local authorities from replacing it by rebuilding. This was a war on the poor, a war on the philosphy behind public housing, fuelled by an idealogical anti-state, pro-individualism agenda. We all remember the famous, ‘There is no such thing as society,’ quote, at least, those of us old enough do, and she meant it. She saw no role for the state in helping the less fortunate, because being ‘less fortunate’ was, for her, simply a manifestation of the ‘something for nothing’ culture. Is this sounding familiar?

We have a banking crisis. She began the deregulation of the financial sector, encouraged the ‘me, me, me’ selfishness of the Yuppie culture, promoted the ‘loadsamoney’ mentality. The reckless pursuit of profit at all costs that led directly to the current financial meltdown is her direct responsibility, aided and abetted by the Thatcherite economic policies of successive governments, including Blair’s and Brown’s.

And then there was Pinochet. Harboured and befriended by Thatcher, Pinochet is the ultimate example of the corrupt dictator. At his death, he faced hundreds of charges relating to the murder and torture of countless civilians and political opponents in Chile and in respect of an allegedly illegally amassed fortune of $28 million. Any person with an ounce of humanity would have been repulsed by such a character; Thatcher embraced him. Why would this be? Well, Pinochet had overthrown a socialist goverment (albeit via a military coup rather than through the ballot box) and had implemented Friedmanesque economic policies, curbing the power of unions and privatising state industries. He was Thatcher’s idealogical bedfellow.

I will not mourn her passing.