Politics and Christianity in the United Kingdom

The big news story today is that Theresa May has managed to agree a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party, whereby their ten MPs will allow her to remain as Prime Minister.  Basically, the government has promised an extra billion pounds in public spending in Northern Ireland in return for the support of the DUP.  While most opposition parties have condemned this arrangement, I wonder if some of them are not perhaps jealous that they have not just persuaded the government to promise some extra public spending.

In a sense, this deal is rather an anticlimax.  When it was first reported that Theresa May was discussing with the DUP, criticism tended to focus on the DUP’s reputation for being tub-thumping Christians, and yet so far as I am aware their deal with the government does not so much as hint at any of the things we were supposed to be worried about.

a related item of news is that Tim Farron recently resigned as leader of the Liberal Democrats, and cited his Christian values as a reason for his departure.   This has drawn a lot of press coverage, with several comment writers arguing that he was effectively driven out of the leadership by people who objected to his being a Christian.

I remember when Tim Farron became party leader back in 2015.  He was interviewed on television about his Christian beliefs, and seemed rather uncomfortable about some of the questions.  Quite simply, this was not something I had ever seen before.   Many prominent MPs over the years have claimed to be Christians, and yet I have never seen any one of them questioned in the way Tim Farron was – and neither was this an isolated incident.  Since then he has endured quite a few interviews where he was asked probing questions about his religious views.

On top of this, Farron has not enjoyed anything like as much support from his party as he could reasonably have hoped for, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that at least some people in his party were trying to force him out.  Farron became leader when the party had just eight MPs, and it is easy to imagine party activists hoping to gain seats at the next general election, so as to allow a new leadership election with a wider choice.

As it turns out, the party now has eleven MPs, including two MPs who have recently returned to the Commons after losing their seats at the 2015 general election.  Both are currently being taken seriously as potential replacement leaders.

As for Tim Farron, he could always quit the Liberal Democrats,  but doing so would almost certainly spell the end of his parliamentary career.  He could try launching a new political party, but I would not expect such a party to exist for long.

One of the many problems faced by supposedly Christian politicians is the almost complete lack of effective support from most if not all of Britain’s church leaders.  I would have great admiration for Britain’s church leaders if they would say publicly that people should not vote for mainstream political parties.  Doing so might give the mainstream political parties an impetus to start taking Christians more seriously – but I don’t expect it ever to happen.

Related previous posts include:
Theresa May and the DUP
Liberal Democrat membership at record level

In defence of the internet

Day after day, the already deeply tarnished reputations of the filth-peddling, tax-dodging, terror-abetting internet behemoths sink lower into the mire.

Apparently above the law, they allow on their platforms the most depraved content, from extreme pornography to terrorist propaganda and images of child abuse.

These are the opening words of today’s Daily Mail comment.

I had planned to write today about grammar schools, but that can wait.  In my most recent post I described the internet as perhaps the most truly egalitarian invention in the history of the world, and now I feel moved to defend it against the invective of a national newspaper (which of course has a considerable online presence).

 

The opening salvo quoted above may make some fair comments, but surely lots of companies seek to avoid paying taxes, and surely almost anyone who has ever published anything could perhaps stand accused of peddling filth.

As for abetting terror, has the Daily Mail ever urged its readers never to vote in elections for terrorist politicians like Tony Blair and David Cameron?  The comments continues:

... rape apologists, anti-Semites and hate preachers receive taxpayers’ money when government-funded adverts appear alongside their YouTube videos.

Adverts for the Home Office, the Royal Navy and the BBC have been run beside videos by the likes of US white nationalist and ex-Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke ... Adverts for Argos, Sainsbury’s and The Guardian appeared next to videos by US preacher Steven Anderson, who praised a terror attack on a gay nightclub.

No definition of the term hate preacher is offered.

I am not aware of who the Daily Mail has in mind when they refer to rape apologists and anti-Semites, but I have often watched videos by David Duke in the past, and never found any of them offensive that I can recall.  As for Steven Anderson, I have just today watched some of his videos, and he comes across as very reasonable – although admittedly I have yet to watch any video of his which discusses homosexuality.

I am also interested to know how many people have ever died in attacks on gay nightclubs, and how that figure compares with the number of people who have ever been killed by the Royal Navy.

The BBC has for many years now advertised the life-ruining National Lottery.  In 2004 it also sought the imprisonment of Nick Griffin and Mark Collett – two brave men who dared to crusade against paedophile grooming gangs at a time when the mainstream media was happily turning a blind eye.

The comment goes on to make a few more reasonable points, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that what the dark forces behind the Daily Mail really want is for the internet to come under the control of censors who will ensure that the internet never peddles any point of view other than that espoused by the mainstream media.

As a final point, the opening reference to behemoths is an allusion to a creature mentioned in The Old Testament.

Metro comment and Niemoeller's prayer

I have already discussed Niemoeller's prayer in a previous blog post, and it is now relevant to mention it again.  Just a few days ago, on 4 January 2017, the Metro newspaper published its first ever editorial comment.  It was on the subject of press freedom.

For many years the press in the United Kingdom was regulated by an organisation called the Press Complaints Commission.  In September 2014 this was replaced by the Independent Press Standards Organisation.  The government is now considering putting pressure on the British press to register instead with a regulatory body called Impress, which is largely funded by Max Mosley.  Any newspaper which does not register with it would do so at the risk of financial ruin.

As an aside, in 2008 Max Mosley successfully sued a national newspaper which had reported on him indulging in a sex orgy with five prostitutes.

A few years ago I made numerous complaints to the Press Complaints Commission about factual inaccuracies in newspapers, one of which involved myself.  Not one of these complaints was upheld, and in not one case did the newspaper in question even admit the possibility that they might be in error.

The Metro comment makes reference to the role of the press in reporting the Rotherham sex grooming scandal, but this is hardly their strongest card.  Paedophile grooming gangs have been operating in the north west of England for far longer than the seventeen years in which the Metro has been in print.  In which year did the Metro first report on it?  In which year did any other national newspaper first report on it?

The truth is that it was almost entirely the efforts of the British National Party which dragged this sordid matter into the public domain, and  yet I cannot think of a single British newspaper which has ever acknowledged this.  In fact I cannot think of a single British newspaper which has ever said anything remotely positive about any patriotic political party.

On the one hand I do not want the British press to be cajoled into submission by an overbearing government, but on the other hand I wish that the people in charge of the British press would display at least some humility regarding their many failures.

Related previous posts include:
Britain First and Niemoeller's prayer
Of Jews and paedophiles

Are you a fascist?

There used to exist a communist country which was commonly known as East Germany.  I remember once seeing its head of government on television making a speech.  In a country devoid of democracy, he referred to its western frontier as the frontier with fascism.  I found this curious - even a trifle amusing - but I eventually realised that this was in fact a key part of the communist mindset.

Fascism - like communism - is a difficult concept to define in words, but basically it is a political ideology which arose in Italy around one hundred years ago.  As with communism, it maintains that the power of the state should be without limits, and holds both democracy and free speech in contempt.  Someone at some point coined the word totalitarianism as an umbrella term to classify both communism and fascism.

But whatever fascism was originally, it is now a word habitually used by communists to vilify almost anything they dislike.

Take for example this recent essay on the website of a national newspaper.  The author talks about the rise of fascism, but without offering any definition, and neither can I find a definition in any of her previous work.

What is obvious however is that she dislikes the outcome of the Brexit referendum, the election of Donald Trump, and tax avoidance by large companies.  I also have a dislike of tax avoidance by large companies, but I would not describe it as fascism.  I would not vote for Donald Trump, but I'm not sure I would describe him as a fascist.  I voted for Brexit, and I certainly do not regard myself as a fascist.

In an essay written in August 2016, the same author describes supporters of Jeremy Corbyn as ordinary, fed-up voters, and I wonder why she cannot bring herself to apply a similar description to British people who voted for Brexit or for American people who voted for Trump.

While the author may see herself and other people like her as marginalised, it is nevertheless the case that she is allowed to put her views across in a national newspaper.  By contrast, I am not sure I have ever come across a genuinely nationalist comment writer in any of Britain's national newspapers.  It is of course true that newspaper comment writers will occasionally put across a patriotic point of view, but this is merely a cynical ploy to encourage people to buy the newspaper.

I have never been invited to write for a national newspaper, and neither to my knowledge has any other patriotic blogger.  I hope that readers of this site will follow my example and never buy any national newspaper.  Read them only when you can do so without letting them have any of your money.

Related previous posts include:
The communist-loving "right wing" tabloids
The Trump phenomenon
What is tax avoidance?

The proscription of Britain First

I rarely make changes to posts on this blog, aside from correcting errors of spelling or punctuation.  I can think of only one post which I deleted, and that was because it linked to photographs which were no longer available online.

Yesterday I read an item in a national newspaper to the effect that many of our obnoxious MPs had asked that the political party Britain First be proscribed as a terrorist organisation.  The rationale for this was apparently that it may have been linked to the supposed murder of Jo Cox, even though there is no evidence that Thomas Mair - the man convicted of her killing - was ever a member of Britain First, or that he had any connection with them, or that they ever condoned violent crime.

This morning I tried to find this press report, but could not.  Maybe it had been removed.  What I did find however was an item about the possible proscription of a group called National Action, and this too was linked to the supposed murder of Jo Cox.

I have already outlined in a previous post some of the reasons why the murder of Jo Cox was almost certainly a false flag.  I will add that Thomas Mair appears to be mentally unstable, barely spoke at all either when questioned by the police or while on trial, and that a press photograph of his book collection appears to show books in pristine condition - as if they had never been read.  He is also alleged to have visited anti-establishment websites on public access computers in libraries - even though local councils across Britain habitually deny access to such websites.

It does not surprise me that not one national newspaper has considered the possibility that the murder of Jo Cox was a hoax.  It also does not greatly surprise me that the only journalist for whom I have any admiration recently described Jo Cox as a shiningly good person. How does he know?  Has he ever met her?

One of the few things we know for certain about Jo Cox was that she nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership of the Labour Party, and then later said that she regretted doing so.  For the record, I'm not aware that Jeremy Corbyn has ever voted for British involvement in an illegal war.

Every British Prime Minister in my adult lifetime has approved of Britain taking part in at least one illegal war, and yet I do not see any MPs calling for either the Labour Party or the Conservative Party or the Liberal Democrats to be proscribed as the terrorist organisations which they undoubtedly are.

Related previous posts include:

Who murdered Jo Cox?

Britain First and Niemoeller's Prayer

Britain First and the fiction of a free country

We can't trust chameleon Dave

The national press versus democracy

First of all, I do not like the Conservative MP Michael Gove.  In fact I am not aware that I like any MP of any political party.  Nevertheless he does not deserve some of the abuse being dished out to him at the moment.

As I write, Gove has recently declared an interest in becoming the next leader of the Conservative Party - and of course Prime Minister.  A lot of comment in the national press is using the word betrayal, along with violent metaphors.  Consider this recent quote from a newspaper columnist:

Six years on, I still cannot quite comprehend how Ed Miliband could effectively knife his own older brother to get his hands on the Labour crown.

Some background is required.  In 2010 Ed Miliband became leader of the Labour Party after winning an election in which his older brother David Miliband was another candidate.  I have lost count of the number of times in which newspapers have labelled this as a betrayal or a stab in the back.  It was nothing of the sort.

 

Ed Miliband contested the leadership of the Labour Party as he had every right to do.  His brother contested the same election, as he also had every right to do.  To regard either brother as having betrayed the other strikes me as utterly childish.

Similar childish language is now being used about Michael Gove in respect of the Conservative leadership election, although for some reason it is not being used about all of the leadership hopefuls.

The use of words like narcissism and Machiavellian are also curious.  Any politician who seeks a higher office can perhaps be described as narcissistic, but the selective use of such a word suggests a bias on the part of the comment writer.

The word Machiavellian is problematic.  It refers to a book called The Prince, which was published in 1532.  It had been written some years earlier by the Florentine former civil servant Niccolo Machiavelli, who died in 1527, and it is not clear if he ever intended it for publication.

The Machiavellian prince is not a simple construct, and it is easy to use a word like Machiavellian without thinking too clearly about its actual meaning.

I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that many people who write for the national press have absolute contempt for democracy.  If one candidate for the leadership of a political party is a narcissist and a Machiavellian, then why can these labels not be applied all of the other candidates as well?

My conclusion - and I may be wrong about this - is that many people in the national press consider it their divine right to ordain who shall lead either the Labour Party or the Conservative Party.  While they are entitled to indicate a preference for one contender over another, the use of infantile language serves no useful purpose.

 

I do not support the Conservative Party, but I hope that it will choose its new leader wth regard to the issues at hand, and without regard to childish rants by comment writers who ought to know better.

Is holocaust denial a bad thing?

A national newspaper has reported on the Vote Leave campaign as follows: The campaign for Britain to leave the EU has been infiltrated by dozens of far-Right extremists with racist views.

I interpret the word infiltrate to imply deception, and the Merriam-Webster dictionary currently defines the word in terms of secrecy.  Therefore I fail to see how a young woman with a large swastika tattoo can be said to have infiltrated any organisation.

At the time of writing, the newspaper identifies Vote Leave campaigner Mark Collett as a senior BNP official, but earlier today I typed his surname into the search box on the BNP website, and it produced no results.

The newspaper also has an issue with another Vote Leave campaigner, Richard Edmonds, having attended a conference of holocaust deniers - that is, people who deny that Hitler's National Socialist regime deliberately exterminated millions of Jews.  This conference was reported on by the same newspaper, although with some subsequent modification.

Some readers might find it curious that many people in the press and on television seem to regard holocaust denial as a sign of bad character.  There are many academic disputes about supposed historical events, and we are not normally expected to demonise people who take one point of view rather than another.

I hope to write in more detail on this subject in future, but then I have said that before.  I will however draw the reader's attention to two quotes from the newspaper report:

Its underpinnings in the realm of historical fact are non-existent – no Hitler order, no plan, no budget, no gas chambers, no autopsies of gassed victims, no bones, no ashes, no skulls, no nothing.

I want the Jews and whoever else is spinning this story to answer certain questions concerning the technology.

I have two questions.  First, why are we expected to despise people who question a supposed historical event when the evidence to support it is lacking?  Second, is any national newspaper proposing at any point to answer the questions concerning the technology?

Related previous posts include:
The denial of Stalin's holocaust
Treason and hypocrisy
The Jews are afraid, but what about the rest of us?

Honesty and drug use: two scientific studies

Newspapers are not always truthful, but sometimes it is hard to fathom why.  A columnist whose work I often admire recently wrote about an academic study into honesty which apparently found that people in European countries tend to be more honest than people in Africa or Asia.

The study did not link the findings with race but with the level of government corruption in different countries, and it is not surprising that a British newspaper should be happy to report that race is not the issue.

What is harder to comprehend is that the columnist completely misrepresented the nature of the study.  It appears that young people in various countries were invited to roll a die twice in secret and then report the score on their first roll.  People who reported a high score were rewarded with money, and so there was an obvious incentive to lie.

The columnist reported that participants had been secretly filmed, and so the people carrying out the study knew which participants were telling the truth.  The curious thing is that this was not true.  I say curious for two reasons.  The first is that there was no obvious reason for the columnist to misrepresent this fact.  The second is that it arguably undermines the entire study.  How can we argue that one group of people are more honest than another when we don't actually know whether or not any of them were lying?

At least one national newspaper today is reporting a study into the effects of prolonged cannabis use, which apparently include an increased tendency to financial problems and to antisocial behaviour.  The comments however are not favourable.  Many of the most highly rated comments refer to people who smoke cannabis and who have  successful careers.  I imagine that there may be a lot of truth in that.

One comment that is worth repeating is that because cannabis use is illegal, a lot of professional people who smoke cannabis would be unwilling to admit it publicly.  That alone might skew the results of any scientific study into cannabis use.

Most of us have met people who live to a great age and enjoy fairly good health despite leading an unhealthy lifestyle.  Likewise, it is perhaps unsurprising that there should be people out there who take illegal drugs without any obvious bad effects.

In other news, Kathryn Smith and her boyfriend Matthew Rigby are on trial for the murder of their young child Ayeeshia Jane Smith, who may have died after accidentally consuming cannabis.  Meanwhile, cannabis user Clayton Smith begins his sentence for the manlaughter of PC Dave Phillips.

The demonisation of Josie Cunningham

Josie Cunningham is a young British woman who is famous for having had her breasts enlarged at public expense.  I can understand that this might not endear her to people who are waiting for hip replacement surgery, but on the other hand it was not by her choice that the taxpayer paid for her breast enlargement.  You might like to remember that next time you vote in an election.

It is now reported that Josie Cunningham- a mother of three - had an abortion after being denied cosmetic surgery on the grounds that she was pregnant.  Apparently she wanted the cosmetic surgery so that she could pursue a career as a pornographic actress. At the time of writing, the comments in the newspaper are overwhelmingly negative.

Since 1967, around eight million babies have been slaughtered in abortion clinics in this country.  Does anyone know how many of those babies died so that their mothers did not have to adjust their career plans?

We live in a society in which we are expected to condemn murder, except when our political masters want us either to condone it or ignore it. Josie Cunningham is a product of a society saturated with hypocrisy, and she is no more worthy of demonisation than millions of other people.

Related previous posts:
A stupid fuss over immigrant abortions
Do we really want what we vote for?

The denial of Stalin's holocaust

Patriots are often labelled in the national press as holocaust deniers, meaning that they do not believe that Hitler's National Socialist regime murdered six million Jews in the period from 1942 to 1945. It is implied that anyone who objects to their country being changed for the worse by open door immigration is a denier, and also that denial is necessarily wrong.

I know from my own experience that many people in the patriotic community do indeed recognise that Hitler's holocaust of the Jews never took place, but maybe that is because they have at least a modicum of regard for logic and for the truth.  The implication that holocaust deniers are necessarily bad people, however, is one that I has yet to be adequately explained.

If I've got it right, there are seventeen countries in the world where it is illegal to question the German holocaust, with imprisonment being among the forms of punishment for violation.  Examples of prosecutions arising from these laws include the case of the French politician who was fined over one million francs for saying that the holocaust was a mere detail in the history of World War II - which does not sound to me like denial.  Another example is the case of the German historian who was prosecuted and fined for questioning the whereabouts of a door.

These prosecutions strike me as cruel and oppressive, but not at all surprising in countries run by communists or their fellow travellers.

The British servicemen who fought to overthrow Hitler were on the same side as Stalin, and were in effect fighting to keep Stalin in power.  It is widely held that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of people - mostly in Ukraine - in the early 1930s.  This event is known as the holodomor, and took the form of an enforced starvation.

I have recently come across an essay on the internet which argues that the holodomor never happened.  My reaction was to read it.  I could have declined to read it, on the grounds that the author was clearly a wicked person, but I am not a communist.

The essay writer argued among other things that a photograph of starving children which has been used as evidence of the holodomor is in fact nothing of the sort.  He maintains that the photograph was taken not during the holodomor, but rather during a period of natural famine in the 1920s.

I have a question.  How many natural famines have taken place in western Europe in the past hundred years?  Does anyone know?

It is true that there have been times in the past hundred years when large numbers of people in western Europe have been hungry, but so far as I am aware these tended to be the consequence of periods of war or of particularly poor government.

I remember when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s.  People from Ukraine were able to visit relatives in Britain, and there were incidents reported of Ukrainians bursting into tears in supermarkets because there was so much food on the shelves.  Their homeland is a fertile country, but under communist rule food was always in short supply.

Hunger and starvation have long been weapons favoured by communists, and it is no surprise that there are many people relying on food banks in both Britain and Greece.

Related previous posts include:
The holocaust continues ...
The Jews are afraid, but what about the rest of us?
The politics of The Hunger Games