9/11 Remembered: LET FREEDOM RING!

Nine years ago, on 11 September 2001, three hijacked airliners slammed into the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Had it not been for the bravery and prompt action of passengers, a fourth flight was destined for either the White House or Congress but ended up crashed in a field with all on board dead. As the Towers imploded and the defence centre at the Pentagon burned, 2,996 lives, including those of 19 hijackers, came to premature and terrible, violent ends.

As they say, the rest is history. Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of deaths and one invasion of Iraq later, the so-called "War on Terror" continues under the new US President, Barak Obama. At the dawn of the 21st century, incredible as it may seem, religious conflict has re-emerged as a defining issue across the planet in a way unparalleled since Pope Urban preached his fateful sermon in 1095 declaring Holy War on Islam because "God wills it!"

And in New York, by the "Ground Zero" site of the former Twin Towers, a new battle rages. No explosives have been used, but the invective and hatred expressed by many more than compensates.

The Cordoba Initiative, an Islamic charity dedicated to interfaith conciliation and named after the Spanish city which, in the Middle Ages, was a haven of multi-religous tolerance, co-operation and learning has proposed to build a cultural centre dedicated to reconciling the Christian and Muslim faiths. Its leader, Imam Faisal, has stressed that "Not all Muslims are terrorists, and terrorists actions are certainly un-Islamic." He has received support from President Obama and from New York Mayor Bloomberg, both of whom have stressed that if the concept of America was built on anything, it was religious freedom.

But the Amercian Right has piled in, decrying the idea of the centre as an affront to the dead, a "Victory Mosque" (even although it is not a mosque!). It is as if the Caliphs have been resurrected and turned up in Manhattan ready to build their own Islamic Triumphal Arch. Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and the odious Glen Beck have decried it. Backed by calm, open-minded, reasonable people like this man - Youtube videoblogger "drinkingwithbob" (who to my mind gives the distinct impression of having spent a little too much time too much with Bob and leaves you mildly concerned about the state of his heart muscles), they have argued the old mantra that such a thing would not be granted to Christians or Jews in Muslim countries.

And here is the thing. Many people in the West assume that once you leave Greece and head east, you don't find another church until you reach Australia. From primary school onwards, the Islamic states are portrayed as a great totalitarian montolith. From Morrocco in the far west of North Africa in a great arc through the Middle east down to Indonesia, it is alleged that no other faiths are permitted and a theocracy of dour mullahs holds sway. And if they have their way, the Muslims are all engaged in a Great Conspiracy to turn countries like Britain and America into similar Muslim fiefdoms.

The West has long lived in fear of The Other. In the 1900s, it was the "Yellow Peril", the Chinese, who were portrayed as slanty-eyed non-Christian devils, cleverly positioning themselves to take over London via the cunning disguise of laundry operatives and waiters. Around the same time, German rightwingers were hawking the fictitious "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", the alleged blueprints for the Jews to take over the world: a conceit that was eagerly spread throughout Europe by the Right and one which persists even now.

Now, with significant Muslim minorities in most west European countries, it is their turn to be tarred with the same brush of alleged hostility and ill intent. With their Arabic script and bearded priests, they are painted as foreign, strange and, inevitably, not to be trusted. Their actual beliefs are largely ignored, their similarity and common origins with Christianity and Judaism unmentioned and even unwelcome as they too clearly challenge the prevailing image of them as strange and alien. Instead, a mosque is set on fire in the USA and a church group proposes to have a "Burn a Koran Day", on the anniversary of 9/11.

So, were we to turn to the Islamic world, would this drab, monlithic, extreme picture be what we would see? Are there really no churches after Istanbul? No tolerance of The Other by these universally blood-thirsty jihadis?

Let's take a quick tour: starting in Turkey, a firmly Muslim country. Its largest city, Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), was the seat of the Patriarch (the head)of the Greek Orthodox Church in the days of the Christian Byzantine Empire. And it still is.

Lets move on south and east to Syria, at one stage threatened by the US with invasion following the fall of Iraq. Here, this summer, the government banned Islamic veils on university campuses, not great for individual freedom but hardly the actions of a theocratic regime. With nearly 1.2 million Christians living and worshipping freely in Syria, about 10% of the population, however, it seems Syria does not fit the Rightwing/Evangelical stereotype of an Islamic state. Perhaps though, with its socialist Baath party regime, it isn't typical.

South to the Lebanon. There was trouble there in the past but...what's this? An elected Parliament with two opposing blocks in it: on one side a pro-western/free market grouping composed of Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Catholic Christians, Maronite Christians and Druze; opposed by a pro-eastern, slightly social democratic grouping composed of...the same mixture of faiths. The President is a Christian. 40% of the MPs are Christian, as is a similar proportion of the population. Beirut is a bustling metropolitan city...

Not there. So how about Jordan, with its 400,000 Christians (7% of the populace), or Egypt, where one in five people worship in the ancient Coptic Christian Churches. Or among the Palestinians, where 75,000 Christians, are honoured by their Muslim neighbours as "The Living Stones" owing to their ancient traditions. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, denounced by the West as a Muslim terrorist organisation, was in fact founded by a Christian, George Habash. More recently Hannan Ashrawi was a prominent female Christian legislator elected to the Palestinian National Assembly.

Christians are smaller in number in North Africa beyond Eqypt, but there are churches of ancient provenance all the way across the Maghreb to the Atlantic shores. And in the opposite, eastern direction, 300,000 Iranian Christians worship at over 70 churches - although in Iraq the once substantial Christian community has ironically largely fled the country following the violence that accompanied the arrival of the US and British forces there in 2003. In Pakistan, nearly 3 million Christians hold to their faith, exempted from many of the laws on clothes and behaviour that are imposed on Muslims and even enjoying a free ration of alcohol from the government each week.

And so it continues, on into Malaysia and Indonesia, where millions more Christians worship, normally untroubled by their Muslim neighbours.

I am not saying that all is sweetness and light. There is real restriction and persecution of people who think the wrong way or don't conform to very restrictive rules in countries like Saudi Arabia - although the Wahabist regime there owes much to western oil companies and governments for its rise and continuation in power. States with sharia law do impose restrictions which we do not see in the West, though they are not of the magnitude imagined by many Americans and Europeans - nor are they necessarly specifically or solely targetted at Christians. As in many other parts of the world following other faiths, politics often twists and manipulates religous belief to cause fracture and discord quite at odds with the core principles of the faith in question.

There has been and is violence and interfaith conflict and in all too many places religion keeps people apart, living parallel rather than joint lives. But this is as common between Christian communities such as the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland or the Catholics and Orthodox in former Yugoslavia as in the Muslim world. And unlike both Judaism and Christianity, Muslims specifically are enjoined in the Koran to protect the followers of the other two faiths as being "Peoples of the Book" as Muslims are also.

And so, to portray Muslims as either monolithic or totalitarian is plainly wrong. Their faith is interpreted by believers in many different ways. Many of their leaders have issued fatwas (decrees) condemning violence and terrorism as plainly un-Islamic - yet efforts by people like Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri and the 1,300 young Muslims at an anti-terrorist Muslim conference in the UK are simply ignored outside the liberal press.

And likewise the Cordoba Initiative in New York. It is not a mosque and is not on Ground Zero, but rather several blocks away. (There are in fact already two mosques closer to Ground Zero than the proposed centre).
And, anyway, what if it was?

Over 70 Muslims were inside the Twin Towers and died in pain and innocence alongside the other victims. These were ordinary people, like 35 year old Sarah Ali from London, who had taken a job there just three weeks earlier and whose father was harassed in the street by rightwing thugs vowing revenge for the "Muslim" attack. Is her death somehow less than the death of her fellow Britons and others who perished? Was she, as a Muslim, somehow collectively culpable?

If this was the case, then by logical extension, are all Christians therefore culpable for the appalling massacre of 7,000 Muslim men and boys by Serbian paramilitaries (who were formally blessed by their Christian priests before carrying out their slaughter) at Srebrenica in July 1995? Or for the 33,000 Muslim civilians killed in the same war (80% of all civilian casualites)?

No one is their brother's keeper. And no one is defined purely by one aspect of themselves. In his wonderful book, "Identity and Violence", Amartya Sen argues that harmony can only come when we start to see each other as individuals first, shaped to some extent by our cultures and faiths, but not helpless victims, or unchangeable automatons. We are each complex and worthy. Only when we recognise that and rise above our apparent desire for simplistic tribal identities that define us so one dimensionally - white or black; Muslim or Christian; man or woman; gay or straight;golfer or tennis player (!)- will we reach a point where we can value and be valued for the multi-faceted humans we are.

There is no war by Islam against the West. There should be no war by the West against Islam. There are many competing interests. Some of them are dark and powerful and selfish. Some of them want to oppress others, force a single world view on everyone else. These can all be found in all countries and among people of all faiths and none. It is only by reaching beyond the simplistic, self-limiting barriers these forces create that we can reach a point where there is true understanding, genuine stability and real, lasting peace.

So, America, be the Leader of the World. Let the Cordoba Initiative build its centre and, in the words of one of the greatest American Christians, "Let freedom ring!"

"People of the Book" - a review of Zachary Karabell's history of Islam and the West

It is always a treat to read something that is tightly written, fresh, and a bit different. This relatively short book (291 pages) is just that - American writer Zachary Karabell captures a broad sweep of history with an exciting gusto that brings periods and places normally obscure to western historians alive and with an immediacy that is explained by his central premise - that Judaism, Christianity and Islam have existed far more in mutual tolerance and respect, and sometimes even harmony, with each other than they have in conflict - whether the conflict of the Crusades or of the contemporary jihadists and neocons.

He takes us through the founding of Islam right up to the 1980s Middle east, yet somehow you do not get the sense of any period being overlooked or short-changed. Whether scholars, soldiers, merchants, priests or philosophers, he brings different ages to life by focusing on individuals of note at various points, though also slips down to take in anecdotes of every day life - how Moses Maimonides, a Jew, felt about working as a doctor at the court of Saladin, the Muslim prince, during the day to go home at night and work on his great treatise of rational Judaism; or how the Muslim caliph, Harun al-Rashid, turned Bagdhad into a centre of multi-faith discourse and learning, where his son held debates with Christian scholars; or how, more recently, men like Abduh argued for a new interpretation of Islam to mirror the Enlightenment process in Europe.

Yet there are dark tales here too - the slaughter of Muslims, Jews and heretic Christians by the Crusaders at the fall of Jerusalem in 1099. The suppression of much of the learning of Islamic centres such as Cordoba and Bagdhad by a more conservative strain of thinking around 700 years ago, one which has persisted in some respects and some societies ever since. And more recently the expulsion of the Palestinians and the creation of an essentially religious based state in Israel in 1948 and subsequently, flying full in the face of history while simultaneoulsy recasting history to justify the present.

Karabell's premise is that, as the third of the three faiths to emerge, Islam has always had to define itself in relation to Christians and Jews, acknowledging them all to have a shared history and a shared God, yet viewing both as incomplete. Mohammed invoked special protection over both Jews and Christians and this is central to the not always easy tolerance shown to both these faiths through history by often politically and militarily superior Muslims.

Contrary to the popular myths in the West of bloodthirsty Arabs forcing Islam on cowed conquered peoples, the book shows how in truth many eastern Christians welcomed the Muslims as they were far more tolerant of their beliefs than their previous rulers, the Orthodox Romans, had been. While in Europe, Jews and Christians who did not hold quite the right beliefs for the official church were persecuted and burned, for centuries, Muslims provided sanctuary to these people, demanding nothing in return other than a poll tax (which excused them from military service, not a bad deal at all). When the Jews were expelled from Christian Spain in the early 16th century, it was the Muslim Ottoman lands that sent ships to carry them to safety - and prosperity under the Sultan and Caliph.

By the same token, Karabell shows that the Crusader states, after their initial belligerence, settled down to a century of tolerance and even interfaith marriage and mixing which worked well for the people in the near east, but caught the inevitable displeasure of the Pope.

So where did this all go wrong?

In one sense of course, it didn't. There are still many societies where people of all three faiths live alongside each other, sometimes integrated, sometimes leading separate lives, in peace. In fact, most of the time, in most places, that is still precisely the case - whether in Egypt with its 10% Coptic Christian populace rearing pigs and drinking wine in a predominantly Muslim society; or in the Lebanon with its multi-religious coalitions, Christian President and Muslim Prime Minister; or in Dewsbury where I live, home to the London bombers but also to the country's first woman Muslim Cabinet Minister.

For most people, their religion is just one aspect of their lives to varying degrees of importance or unimportance. For example, Turkey is portrayed by some in Europe as a fundamentalist Muslim society ill-suited to joining the EU. Yet any visit to Istanbul would show you a city (outside the tourist area) indistinguishable from London, Berlin or Paris, and where a lower per centage of people attend Friday prayer at mosque than turn up at the near empty Churches of England on Sundays. Why then all this talk of a clash of civilisations? And why a desire to rediscover a false history of conflict and despair when in truth the times of togetherness have been far more of the story - and will need to be again for any hope of a future for us all?

There is no neat answer - except that perhaps where there has been conflict, it has been where religion is one of many elements, the central ones being, as ever, social justice and freedom, yet religion has been used sometimes by religious zealots, and often sometimes by populist (or just desperate) political leaders to justify the most dreadful deeds.

If Karabell shows anything, it is that each of these faiths can be and are interpreted in many many ways by their followers. And perhaps there is the one issue he does not tackle - Monotheistic faiths which each claim to be the revealed word and the sole, true, exclusive path to God and Truth, contain within them the seeds of conflict. However hard they may try, either scripturally or as individual believers, to respect, tolerate or even associate with those of other faiths, can faiths which proclaim one God and one way, ultimately live in real peace with each other?

The violence of Bin Laden's jihad and Bush's crusade may sit ill with faiths which proclaim love and peace, but as they each also proclaim themselves as the sole Truth, everything else by default stands ultimately as a lie. And woe unto those who worship a lie when a Believer of a certain ilk, fired up with the zeal of the One True God, steps forward to spread the Word.

Very much worth reading; this book has made and will keep making me think for a very long time.



"People of the Book" by Zachary Karabell is published in the UK by John Murray, isbn 978-0-7195-6755-1

"If You Don't Have Tears In Your Eyes, You Will Cry In Your Heart."

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN Tuesday, 10 February 2009 at 00:11

These poignant words will stay with me until the day I die, not least because the girl who spoke them is just ten years old - a Palestinian in Gaza interviewed on tonight's "Panorama" programme on BBC1. She had just shown a picture - a drawing in typical child's form, stick figures drawn with crayons - "This is my Mum when the missile cut her in half." "This is my brother holding his baby son...his brains were dripping out." She said she still hoped to have a life, or at least half a life, but she was finding it hard to believe both her parents were dead.

This appeared to be a belated attempt by the BBC to right their bias in their reporting of the war against Gaza, as well as their bizarre refusal to broadcast a humanitarian appeal a couple of weeks ago in case they were seen to be anti-Israeli. Here, their reporter, Jeremy Bowen, did go out of his way to show that many many homes of Palestinians had been bombed and even susbequently flattened by Israeli bulldozers with the dead unburied still inside, entombed in their homes. And he did point out as he stood among the rubble that each pile represented someone's home or business and was unlikely to do anything but increase hatred and antagonism towards Israel.

He interviewed International Red Cross representatives who said that, in contravention of international law, Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers had denied them access to the injured for 2 days and there was no evidence that they had treated anyone themsleves as they are expected to do. One boy of 15 was interviewed, his eyes bleak with despair, as he explained how he had sat with the corpse of his mother, his own legs shattered and unable to walk, while his brother slowly bled to death a few feet away.

This, we were then told by the Israeli Government spokesman, was done to stop terrorism and if people suffered it was the fault of Hamas, not the IDF weapons that rained down on Gaza. They had warned civilians to get out of areas due to be attacked he insisted - and of course claimed they only attacked buldings where Hamas fighters or weapons were.

But Gaza is a tiny, cramped place - 1.6 million people in an area smaller than the Isle of Wight - so where were these people supposed to flee to? With both Israel and Egypt keeping the tiny territory sealed, anyone inside was effectively trapped and at the mercy of what was clearly pretty indiscriminate firing by the IDF.

Bowen did not point this out, however. Just as he also failed to point out that Hamas fighters inevitably were in the streets of Gaza - because where else could they be? No modern war is fought on some neat, open battlefield like Waterloo or El Alamein. Gaza was more like Stalingrad - so if we eulogise, rightly, the Soviets who defended the ruins of that city house by house, why was it so wrong or surprising that Hamas fighters, the only army that the Gazans have, defended their city when it was attacked by fighting in that city?

Film was shown of white phosphoros shells falling on Al-Quds hospital, again in contravention of international law - by which hospitals are never to be attacked. Bowen did mention that the use of white phosphoros is illegal "in some circumstances" - he did not specify that its use in civilian areas (like hospitals) is one such; nor, more importantly, that when the first reports of its use emerged during the attack, Israel flatly denied it.

The BBC remains guilty alongside much of the rest of the international media of grossly misreporting this war. It continued even tonight to equate the puny attacks of the Hamas rockets which killed 4 Israelis to the assault of the IDF which killed 1400 Palestinians. They left unchallenged the Israeli claim that nearly all the 1400 were "Hamas terrorists", when at least 600 were children and many more were women and male civilians.

Israel will tomorrow almost certainly elect its most extreme rightwing Government in history. In pole position is likely to be a party committed to expelling the remaining Israeli Arab citizens, completing the ethnic cleansing which began in 1948, when hundreds of thousands were driven out of Israel into Gaza, which now exists as a huge, permanent refugee camp.

President Obama has early on indicated that he believes Israel has a right to expand its borders - as indeed Israel's constitution allows for, a unique position in world constitutions - and has ruled out talking to Hamas. Like the BBC, he seems to ignore the unassailable fact that Hamas is the democratically elected Palestinian government which came to power in multi-party elections - instead, like Bush before him, he is already signalling he will deal instead with the electorally defeated and discredited PLO-Fatah.

How would it be if the world had ignored Obama's election and was treating John McCain as the real President of the USA? How does he expect Hamas to respond? And how does he, and Israel, expect the people of Gaza to respond? Looking into the empty, grief-struck eyes of the traumatised children of Gaza, have they not simply created a new generation of grievance, a next generation of suicide bombers and budding rocketeers?

It is common in the West to see Israel as "like us" and the Arabs as "the Other". Yet the Palestinians we saw tonight were striking in that their world, their lives and homes, their aspirations were so like ours - the doctor who mourned his four teenage daughters, one of whom had hoped to follow him as a doctor and another studying to be a journalist; on the wall of their destroyed bedroom, next to the splattered brains of another dead daughter, a "Barbie" sticker incongruously decorated the shattered plaster. A legitimate target, the IDF spokesman said, because Hamas may have been nearby.

History is written by the victors and, in spite of a half-hearted effort, Bowen and the BBC comprehensively failed tonight to explore the truth - that this war, like the war in Lebanon in 2007, was a war embarked on by an Israeli Government with poor poll ratings and by a country terrified of any of its neighbours being successful - because if they are, they may cease to be "the Other".

Just as Lebanon has an albeit fragile unity across three or more distinct faith groups, the Palestinians contain a significant Christian minority (the so-called "Living Stones") which enjoys greater protection among its Muslim compatriots than the few Christians inside Israel have in an increasingly monolithic society. These facts are never explored, never revealed - why, for example, was Yasser Arafat trying to reach Bethlehem for the last Christmas of his life, when the IDF decided to besiege him in Gaza for the final terrible, tragic weeks of his time on earth? Because, although a Muslim himself, he was trying to join with his Christian compatriots in their religious celebrations.

The Middle East is a complex, mulitfaceted range of different societies, faiths and politics. It is this that makes it both far more tolerant than people in the West realise and which frustrates hope while simultaneously offering it - Jew, Christian and Muslim have lived longer in peace there than they have in war; it is not impossible they may do so again. But first we have to step back from the simplistic politics of confrontation where manipulative politicians deliberately drive polarisation to the extremes.

This will not suit the western media as it does not sit with a western culture which demands instant, easy explanations with things neatly fitting into boxes and defintions. But it will be the only way to find a solution, the only way to reach any ultimate truth.

And as a start, President Obama and the European Governments which between them wield so much influence over Israel need to recognise that, however unpalatable it may be, Hamas is part of that solution.

Maybe he's been watching too much of the BBC.

In war, truth is the first casualty. Aeschylus Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC - 456 BC)

And the children are the second, followed by the future...

The Winter of our Discontent

Worst winter in years throws further doubt on 'global warming'
(Times Educational Supplement)
Alarmists wrong on global warming (British Democracy Forum)
If global warming is real, why is it so damned cold? (Answerbag)

And so on....

With the freezing cold weather of the last few weeks across much of western Europe, plenty of climate change deniers have happily huffed in the cold that here is the proof climate change is...a political delusion; a stealth tax; a leftwing conspiracy against big business, etc.

Yet a few weeks of bad weather does not mean global warming is not happening - on the contrary a long predicted symptom of climate change is more and more extreme weather, both hot and cold, droughts and floods, as the planet's systems come under increasing strain. And warming is a gloabl phenomenon, which means you can have all manner of local and regional variants. For example, while Britain reeled under inches of snow and the lowets temperatures in decades, Alaska and Canada were nearly 10 degrees warmer than normal for this time of year on many days.

Globally, the weather event known as La Nina has artificially cooled the planet over the leat decade or so since the record warm year of 1998. In the last few weeks, this has finally ended and been replaced by its opposite, El Nino, which equally warms up the planet. Both in their different ways mask the real underlying trend, which ramians steadily upwards as countries continue to fail to agree any effective concerted action to tackle climate change.

And more locally here in the UK, with people grumbling that the Government should be salting roads more? (It always strike me there is a high correlation between people who expect local councils to have an endless supply of salt to scatter on roads, and vehicles to do this, and those not wanting to pay any more tax ever, period! Let's have our cake and eat it!)

So, how does the UK face warming disaster with our land shrouded in dazzling white snow and ice?

For thousands of years, Britain has enjoyed a temperate climate owing to the warming effects of the Gulf Stream coming across the Atlantic. Now, global warming is melting the polar icecaps and colder water is flowing into the Atlantic Ocean. Indeed, for the first time in recorded history, the North Pole ice receded so far in summer 2008 that ships could sail from Europe to Japan over the once mythical North-west sea passage. This meltwater is cooling the Gulf stream waters and reducing its warming effect on the UK, so as the planet warms overall, the real irony is that our winters may become much colder, and our summers much warmer.

One swallow does not make an autumn, and one snowflake does not usher forth a new ice age. Wise up!

"Everything is fine today - that is our illusion." - Voltaire

It is a widely promulagted fiction that Britain's political system is the fruition of centuries of linear development towards a liberal democracy: we arrogantly grant our Houses of Commons and Lords the title "The Mother of Parliaments". No gory French Revolution for us; no Latin American military juntas or Nazi dictatorship. The British people have over centuries of graceful partnership, moderation and, well, plain jolly good sense worked out the wonderful paragon of freedom and democratic practice we are today.

The truth is very different - both today and in history.

Today, we are ruled by a Government that, thanks to our voting system, holds 60% of the seats in Parliament with just 35% of the votes cast - would Mugabe have got away with this? A Government which rules as "King-in-parliament". This means that the constitutional legitimacy of the Government stems from its appointment by the monarch, the Queen, rather than by the choice of the people. We all are, in any case, subjects of the monarch. In most European countries, the Constitution establishes the rights of the citizen; in the United Kingdom of Great Britain, our rights and freedoms are granted by the Monarch, and able to be removed at any time. Unlike most Europeans, the USA and many, many others, we have no written constitution - only rules and precedents established over time, open to wide interpretation and fairly arbitrary change.( http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/british_constitution1.htm )

Surely it doesn't matter that much? It is just theory - in practice, we are free. But consider this: in the last 8 years, buoyed along by the USA after 9/11 and showing no sign of stopping, the British Government has established hundreds of new criminal offences and state powers to spy on you and arrest you for nothing more than the suspicions of some petty official.

A protest exclusion zone around Parliament has led to the arrest and prosecution of peace activists for nothing more threatening than reading out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq at the national Cenotaph; terrorist law has been used to confiscate green activists' toothbrushes as dangerous weapons and arrest a teenage girl for riding her horse in a suspicious manner; and notoriously, Labour Party member Walter Wolfgang survived Nazi persecution arriving in the UK in 1937 as a Jewish refugee only to end up being arrested and held by police for several hours for booing the Home Secretary during his speech at the 2005 Labour party conference. You may even now be arrested for handing out leaflets in town centres without a proper licence - in some, you cannot do it at all as many of our public spaces have been sold off to prviate landowners and, as such, are private property.

In themselves, these instances may seem obstructive and nonsensically counterproductive - the laws have even been used to spy on the incorrect use of dustbins - but the return of Binyam Mohamed from Guantanamo earlier this year to the UK reminds us of the more sinister side of this. ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/23/binyam-mohamed-guantanamo-plane-lands ) This man was held for seven years, tortured by proxy by Pakistan and Moroccan security services using questions provided by the UK. The most damning evidence against him? That he had read a joke article by a leftwing magazine about how to make your own nuclear bomb from the contents of your kitchen cupboard - ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/feb/21/barbara-ehrenreich-guantanamo ). Detained without charge or trial, he is home now, a broken man. And in the UK, horrendously, a raft of people - mainly wanted by the security services in such free countries as Jordan and Algeria - are held in indefinite home arrest.

And coming soon...a national database of every email, telephone call and text message you send, preserved by the State and its tens of thousands of officials to inspect, interpret and act upon as they decide; a database of the details of every child in the UK (let's put the vulnerable at as much risk as possible!); and then the greatest of all - the National Identity Card - not compulsory, but required if you want medical treatment, social security and just about any service requiring proof of identity. The Government has already admitted the ID scheme will not work against terrorism, but is throwing up to £18 billion into it - a little know fact is that one of the the private companies bidding to be involved has on its Board the former Home Secretary who introduced the scheme - David Blunkett. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_national_identity_card )

The current Government claims of course that all this is simply to protect us from the allegedly innumerable threats against our peace and security; our way of life, it is said, is at threat. Yet what are we left defending when we surrender the freedoms we have fought for centuries in a matter of months?

And fought we did. Not just in the war against Hitler, which is usually meant when people say that. The fact is, we had to fight tooth and nail for our freedoms against an instransigent, often violent and oppressive state which sought to demonise, exclude and destroy any and every threat to the Establishment that runs our society. For centuries, Church and State combined to keep the Order of things intact through a mix of faith and fear. And when with the passage of time that became harder, they did not change their method, but rather refined it - controlling "freedom" of speech and arresting those too radical to be accommodated within the system.
The Magna Carta is often touted as the start of constitutional government in England; yet this was little more than a Baron's Charter. It retained the feudal order intact, while the Parliaments of de Montfort incorporated the new merchant classes into the Established way of things. These were instruments which maybe rearranged the existing order a little, allowed some "New Men" in, but ultimately left the system untouched. Even Cromwell suppressed the first socialist stirrings of the Levellers and Covenanters during our short-lived Republic and the "Glorious Revolution" of 1689 simply enshrined bigotry and hierarchy in spite of the titles given to laws such as the "Bill of Rights".

In the late 18th century, Thomas Spence emerged as a radical thinker who advocated land redistribution, freedom of the press, voting rights for men and women, and social security for those unable to work. Under slogans such as "The Land is the People's Garden", he and his supporters advocated social reform which quickly gained popularity, so much so that the Government quickly took to arresting many and closing down the pamphleteers who spread their ideas - this, a foretaste of today, was done for the sake of national security and public order, with France rather than Islam as its bogeyman. Spence himself was imprisoned several times.

After his death in 1814, Spencean societies were formed as part of a widespread, decentralised movement, with public houses as their meeting places and social and economic equality their watchwords. Government spies inflitrated them and in 1816 the authorities violently suppressed a rally and charged several leaders of the movement with high treason, with death as the penalty. Fortunately, the jury system meant they were acquitted. (The jury system is one of the few mechanisms that seems rooted in British thinking, though in recent years even this has come under threat from the current Government).

In 1819, at Peterloo in Manchester, a rally by people demanding the right to vote for Parliament (a right at that time granted to a tiny handful of the richest members of society) was charged by cavalry, killing 15 and injuring as many as 700 people. The Government followed this up by a strikingly familiar raft of new laws called the "Six Acts". These made it possible to arrest someone suspected of undertaking irregular military training; allowed homes to be searched arbitrarily for weapons; reduced the opportunities for bail; required public meetings to be registered if more than 50 people attended; imposed stiffer penalties for publishing material held to be seditious; and taxed newspapers which published opinions as well as facts. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Acts )

Unsuprisingly, this did nothing to reconcile the Spenceans to the Government, and during the succession crisis following the death of the King in 1820, twelve of the most radical attempted an ill-conceived plot to muder the entire Cabinet at dinner - later known to history as the Cato Street Conspiracy after the site of their shortlived base of operations. This ended in a sword and gunfight and the execution or exile of the leaders.( http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRcato.htm )( http://thomas-spence-society.co.uk/ )

Over the rest of the century, trade unions, socialist societies and many religious reformers struggled hard for change - and slowly won changes, however grudgingly surrendered by the Establishment. As late as 1884 many men did not have the vote and a further 45 years (and several deaths of suffragettes) were to elapse before all women were to enjoy that right too. And every step of the way, the Establishment resisted - even when overt violence declined and political debate did become more established, the incumbent Order continued to resist any changes or challenges to how things are - even now, with the collapse of the banking system and the economy of the world in disarray, it kicks back and resists any suggestions of real, deep seated change.

So Britain remains prey to those who would limit and remove the rights we have won over centuries of struggle. And our lack of a written constiution and the fact of our Monarchy combine to make us ever more vulnerable to those who would hold our freedom in their hands, to dispense with as they please. If this is not quite entirely the intention of the current Government, what guarantee might we have of the motives of a future one, perhaps of different hue? How much easier has this Government made the path to Britain's future concentration camps?

We need a written constitution and a republic if we are to have any chance of establshing a truly fair and free society and changing the rotten core of inequality, greed, excess and waste that is at the heart of capitalism. Violence, actual and implied, has been at the heart of the struggle for rights for all for centuries - most of it instigated by the Government of the day, the agent of the status quo. Our political masters, in the Name of the King, are all-powerful, their police state mentality cleverly concealed in a cloak of liberalism. If we allow, it could soon just as easily be a shroud, a winding-sheet for democracy and freedom.
http://www.unlockdemocracy.org.uk/

Limits to Growth = Limits to Wealth

(Right -The Desert of Capitalism: on the left in this satellite picture is Haiti, whose Government has permitted full-scale exploitation of the forests by big business. On the right, the Government of the Dominican republic has poured public funds into Eco-tourism and conservation - the results are plain to see.)

The mainstream of politics often combines its reluctant nod to the need for environmental protection with a hasty assurance that capitalism can yet deliver "green growth". Like latter day alchemists, they claim a synthesis of the free market with modern technology, and a healthy dose of genetic engineering for good measure, will somehow deliver a nirvana of never-ending increases in production and consumption and, of course, profit in a sustainable way.

This, of course, is the underlying folly of capitalism - that limitless demand can somehow be met ultimately with limitless supply. In any other realm of human activity, under any other title, the concept would be laughed out as fantasy at best, dangerous delusions at worst. But for our planet, its species mired in an unchallenged liberal economy now for over twenty years, if not much longer, capitalism is as essential as the air we breathe (or even more essential, given the damage capitalism is permitted to inflict on our air). Since Fukyama declared the end of history with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have been left with a received wisdom and socio-political consensus that there is only one way forward: free markets, deregulated as far as possible. And through the 1990s and the start of this decade, enough crumbs fell to enough people from the Masters' tables to maintain the illusion that somehow everyone would benefit. The suffering of hundreds of millions of the poorest in all societies, their poverty - both relative and absolute - was effectively shut out of the media as effectively as the thousands of "gated communities" that have sprung up throughout the western world have physically shut out the offending sight of poor from the eyes of the rich.

Of course, we now see this Neverland unravelling before our eyes with the banking crisis and the recession. But how has it been dealt with? After all the wringing of hands, the denunciation of "greedy" bankers (as if somehow there were some who were not) and the declaration that such things could never be allowed to happen again, what do we find? A handful of bankers have departed their well-paid jobs, in nearly all cases with handsome pay offs and swollen pension pots. Even Fred Goodwin, who captained the Royal Bank to ruin, continues to pick up a pension of £342,500 plus pa, along with a seven figure lump sum, while 9,000 of his former employees have lost their jobs. At least he will be able to get the scratches on his car fixed. His worst penalty? "Blackballed" allegedly by the membership committee of Saint Andrews Golf Club - now that's capital regulating itself!

Now this past week, we are told the bankers are now returning to their old habits. Kept afloat with the hard earned money of taxpayers, after spending years themselves doing their utmost to avoid paying their personal income tax and their organisations' corporate taxes, they now feel ready to carry on as normal.

No surprise. The capitalist system has an inherent driver - it is to maximise your return for the minimum investment of effort: You want something I have. My intention becomes to find what is the absolute greatest level of value that you will surrender to me for it. There are no ethical considerations. No long term planning. No morality other than how do I extract the most wealth from you, for me. Now.

So it is little wonder that, with some signs the current downturn has flattened out, that capitalists seek to assert their normal behaviours. They have always done so in the past - why would they not now? It is, we are told, the "natural" way of doing things, so why would their nature suddenly change?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/banks-are-forgetting-lessons-of-crisis-already-warns-turner-1716001.html

The corollary of all this though is that the concept of a "return to normal" IS unrealistic - the imbalance in wealth, globally and in the UK, is at a historic high. The gap between rich and poor has never been wider. Tiny numbers of people hold vast quantities of wealth while resources grow tight and environmental degradation impoverishes hundreds of millions - both developments driven by the voracious need of capitalism to feed the pockets of shareholders rather than the bellies of hungry children.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/aug/04/workandcareers.executivesalaries

It is not sustainable, which is why a return to normal ways can only be a temporary phenomenon. Capitalism is driving the planet and our species to the edge. Any recovery may last a while - a year, two years, a decade even, but soon enough, the impact of passing not just peak oil but peak carbon fuel production will kick in with a thump that will bring whole economies crashing down, banks and governments with them, and social unrest, disorder, violence and war may well be the most obvious result.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/08/kingsnorthclimatecamp.climatechange
There is another future: a Green one, offering redistribution of wealth, fairer societies, banks and enterprises focussed on mutual protection and community need rather than shareholder dividends and private profit. A sustainable future that has plans for the next 50 and 100 years, not the next 3 to 5 years which fit the common corporate business plans of most capitalist companies. This way recognises that there are limits to growth, there is only so much that can be extracted without needing to replenish. And this in turn leads to the point that if there are limits to growth, there need also to be limits to wealth: that a sustainable society seeking the common good has, by virtue our human condition and our planet's limits, to set a maximum level of wealth that an individual can hold, in income and in wealth. Any other way can only lead to the chaos and collapse of the capitalist scenario.

We face a choice: green and growth cannot be intertwined indefinitely; we need to learn that there are limits - to what we can have, to what we can take. Instead, we have to find how we can do more with what we have - and all the evidence points to those people who already do so have happier and healthier lives than those who are tied in, emotionally, psychologically, financial and physically, to the capitalist treadmill. If this can be translated to the whole community, if it can become the zeitgeist, the underpinning ethic of society, a transformation can begin - but it will involve hard choices and political action.

It won't be an easy option or a soft choice: I am not arguing for a touchy-feely hippy revolution.

But I AM arguing for a revolution.

Global Warming: they just don't get it.

The Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, warned this week that climate change will affect all our lives after a report stating a two degree rise in average temperature by 2040 is now unavoidable, and it could be up to eight degrees by 2080.

We are then told to plan and build better flood defences.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/18/climate-change-report

Read Mark Lynas' book "Six Degrees" and you will see there a grimly sober, well-sourced assessment that by six degrees, there will be nothing left to defend from rising seas.
http://www.marklynas.org/2007/2/3/our-final-warning-degree-by-degree

A six degree increase across the planet will extinguish life as we know it: apart from in the polar regions (possibly not even there), the ecosystem that human and most forms of animal life depend on will have collapsed and the atmosphere will be barely breathable.

It may seem a huge change for a relatively small increase in temperature, but the biosphere that sustains life is thin in the extreme - not only is it a tiny layer between the planet and outer space; it is also sustained by an extremely precarious balance in nature. It has been disturbed naturally in the past, though the changes then have nearly always been over centuries and millenia, not the decades of the current changes.

We have it in our gift to avoid this: but if we don't change, if we don't move to a fairer society based on local, sustainable production and moderate our consumption, we face the prospect of making this the final century not only of our civilisation, but of our very species.

Mr Benn needs to think about more than flood defences.