society – Page 8 – All Things Considered

19 Aug

Is the social engineer here?

When you notice two items side by side, do you get the urge to join them together?

A report on the BBC’s Today Programme this morning told us that Tony Blair’s 1999 ambition – “Educashun, Educashun, Educashun,” remember – to have 50% of all youngsters attend university has been achieved. But the reporter confessed that this is not quite the roaring success it appears to be. For many graduates are going into jobs which don’t require a university degree.

This item was followed immediately by the announcement that the number of houses being built in Britain is a lot lower than the country’s needs. The main reason given for this was that building companies can’t find the carpenters, electricians and other skilled tradesmen they require.

I’m not normally fond of Americanisms, but their pithy phrase, “Go figure” seems apt here.

For when we’ve gone and figured, we understand that youngsters who might, better advised, have been inclined to learn a trade, instead found themselves saddled with a government loan in order to waste three years “reading” Golf Studies with Tourism or, as it might be Applied Social Policy and Hairdressing.

Quite apart from the important point that our higher education system is not producing the numbers of people to do the work that the country requires, Blair’s impudent piece of social engineering guarantees that many young people are not fulfilling their vocations, exercising their aptitudes and settling into suitable and rewarding work.

Square pegs and round holes. Lives are being spoilt – and all for Blair’s arrogant obsession.

We are now told, of course, that universities shouldn’t be elitist. What should they be, then mediocritist?

For centuries the university was a place where that minority of people interested in such things – and who perhaps experienced a calling to study them – devoted themselves to philosophy, theology, literature and the theoretical sciences. Most people were neither interested in these subjects nor called to study them. Fine – there are many other noble and respectable ways of spending one’s life. You could be an electrical engineer, a plumber, a joiner or any one of a hundred different trades.

Proficiency in a trade such as engineering or carpentry is not inferior to theoretical activity; only it is different. Wittgenstein was an engineer. Jesus was a carpenter.

Now we are living in the mess caused by Blair’s perverse desire to send half our youngsters to waste their time in universities

And what, pray, is Tony Blair? Is he an intellectual? Is he a practical man? No, he is that most arrogant and destructive of creatures: a social engineer.

17 Aug

Capitalism, wot capitalism?

A report claims that, under our unfair capitalist economic system, the wages of senior executives are 183 times those of their workers. But now here’s a funny thing:

“in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Marx’s dreaded capitalism was at its peak, robber barons were at their most oppressive and, according to Freedom House, democracy did not exist, the average ratio of income earned by US corporate directors and their employees was 28:1. Yet in 2005, when history had ended, democracy was in full bloom and egalitarianism proudly reigned supreme, this ratio stood at 158:1 (a study jointly conducted by MIT and the Federal Reserve). – Democracy as a Neocon Trick by Alexander Boot.

In other words, western economies are much more socialised than they were a hundred and fifty years ago. Today governments control the economy to a degree undreamt of in Victorian times. Taxes are higher and there is considerably more public spending – and yet the pay ratios between the top and the bottom are more extreme.

How much capitalism do we actually have?

50% of Britain’s GDP goes to the public sector. In so called communist China it is only 17%. At the height of their totalitarian tyranny, the Soviets were only spending 10% more than we do today. Never mind the anti-capitalist rhetoric, examine the facts. You are taxed on your wages. Then you pay 20% VAT on nearly everything you buy with the money on which you have already been taxed.

Fuel taxes are at an outrageously high level. If we have a car we pay road tax. If we drink or smoke, the price of our pints and fags are artificially inflated by taxation. Governments ask people to save, so to reduce the burden of taxation. But the prudent who do save are paid little or no interest. In fact, with rates as they are, savers – especially among the older generation – are actually losing money by their thrift. If we do save, we are taxed again on the meagre interest

If we do our bit by buying shares in British companies, we are taxed on our dividends. There are further taxes on share dealing. The state broadcasting propaganda department fiercely polices an annual tax called the TV licence. The industrial, commercial, financial and manufacturing companies which generate income for the country pay large sums in Corporation Tax and other business taxes. And, in the form of Inheritance Tax, we have to pay up again even when we’re dead. British businesses which ought to be leading our economic recovery are prevented by labyrinthine corporate and state regulation.

Is this what today’s report calls “capitalism”? These levels of taxation and regulation are combining to hinder economic recovery. And such taxes are required only because the government needs them to pay for its massively expanded army of civil servants, its quango mountain, its legions of useless box-tickers, its lousy education system, the failing and scandalously corrupt NHS, and its bloated state welfarism. Then there are the orchestrated protests against “the cuts.” The truth is that this government will be borrowing and spending more when it leaves office than it did when it came in. Whatever economic and social system is currently being operated in our country, it is not by any shadow of meaning capitalist.

03 Aug

Come with me along “a real avenue” in Rotherham

Barnardo’s children’s charity has received £3million to pay a team of specialists to tackle child sex abuse in Rotherham. The charity intends to hire fifteen workers to help victims and those at risk of child sex exploitation (CSE). This is a direct result of last year’s Jay report which revealed that 1400 children, mainly indigenous white girls, in Rotherham were abused by gangs of men, mainly Muslim, between 1997 and 2013.

Why this preference for white girl? Why don’t the Muslim men pick on their own girls? Ah but they do. But, as a BBC File on Four documentary some months ago discovered, the mothers of abused Muslim girls tell them they must not report the abuse to the police, “In order not to bring dishonour to the community.”

Funny use of the word honour. We were told there is honour among thieves. Now it seems that we must believe there is honour among rapists.

The three-years programme, funded by the government, Rotherham Council and the KPMG Foundation, will start in the autumn.

Council leader Mr Chris Read said the scheme was an “innovative project.” That phrase tells us absolutely nothing we didn’t know before: of course it’s innovative – it wasn’t happening earlier and it will happen now only because it is being funded by the tax-payer, Rotherham council tax-payers and KPMG shareholders.

It’s a waste of money, a gimmick designed to persuade the public that something is being done to prevent the rape of children.

Strangely, the Jay report found Rotherham Council had “failed to tackle the abuse.” Strange, because it’s not the job of the council to do that. Odd choice of words, that tackle the abuse. I can attach no meaning to it.

What is actually required is the arrest of the perpetrators, and that is the job of the police. But this was never done, because practitioners of the well-known religion of peace and love – who also happen to be rapists – scream “Islamophobia!” if anyone ever dares suggest their conduct falls short of perfection.

Barnardo’s chief executive Javed Khan says the project “will help teach organisations working with children in the town how to spot the signs of CSE.”

Well, I’m sure Mr Khan is delighted to be informed that his charity is to be better off to the tune of three million quid. But there’s no need to spend money trying to spot the signs. The abused children themselves complain frequently to the police. The problem is that they are not listened to because the police are shy of offending practitioners of that well-known religion of peace and love.

In succulent bureaucratese Mr Khan said, “A project like this will be a real avenue for people to get that support and we have got to work really hard to make sure we don’t let the children of Rotherham down,”

What the hell is a real avenue? And the children of Rotherham have been let down already.

Here is the scandal and here is the disgrace: in today’s Britain there is a particular and very identifiable section of the community which is above the law.

02 Aug

Who gets the Lebensraum?

Before his annexation of a particular country, Adolf Hitler would announce to the world: “This is my last territorial demand.” Then he would send in his troops and take over several other states as well.

Hitler’s method has formed the pattern for the development of the Church of England over the last half century

Back in the 1960s, when sane Anglicans protested against the trashy new orders of service which were then being produced, the bishops and the synod assured us: “These are merely alternatives. The Book of Common Prayer will always remain the standard for worship and doctrine in the Church of England.”

Like Hitler, they lied. Today churches which use The Book of Common Prayer for their main services are as hard to come by as the four-leafed clover.

When it came to that other piece of iconoclasm, the abolition of the all-male priesthood, the hierarchical innovators proceeded similarly. The early synodical votes on the women priests issue went against the feminists. So, as the true democrats they always claimed to be, did they accept the votes? Of course not. In the words of John Habgood, Archbishop of York in the 1980s, “The vote has been lost, so now we must decide how to proceed.”

But, if the vote is lost, you don’t proceed, John: that’s what democracy means.

Now the feminists have achieved their stated aims and we have women priests and women bishops.

But this is not their last territorial demand.

There is a group of feminists who call themselves WATCH, which stands for Women and the Church. I don’t know why they didn’t call themselves Women in the Church – since that is what they are – and then we could have had a more interesting acronym.

All the while the bureaucratic scheming was going on to provide us with women priests and women bishops, various solemn undertakings were announced to provide also for the priestly and episcopal oversight of orthodox Anglicans who were not prepared to accept the feminists’ innovations which are clearly in breach of New Testament teaching and the doctrine of The Book of Common Prayer.

And so alternative episcopal oversight became a reality in the shape of the so-called flying bishops. (Please note that word alternative: in the mouths of the modernisers it is always a lie and a trick)

Let me give you the most recent example, the latest territorial demand, as it were.

All bishops celebrate Chrism Masses at which the holy oils are blessed. The orthodox, genuine bishops obviously celebrate these Masses for the benefit of the orthodox believers. The bishops appointed by the feminists do likewise.

Fair enough?

Not for WATCH. They have made a complaint to high officialdom concerning the very existence of these Chrism Masses among the orthodox. They say such Masses are divisive and shouldn’t be allowed.

I suppose we are meant to think that there was nothing divisive about the overthrow of 2000 years of Christian tradition in the creation of women priests and bishops!

WATCH’s objection perfectly exemplifies their desire not to live side-by-side with the orthodox, but to ban our orthodox observances: effectually, to stamp us out.

This is their latest territorial demand – but it will not be their last.

30 Jul

As rigorously transparent as a barn door

A journalist from Newsweek was interviewing Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury: “Some suspect there is still a hierarchy above the law. I was thinking of Jimmy Savile.”

The Archbishop replied: “If there is, I don’t know about it. As regards child abuse, there is rigorous transparency.”

So why, after numerous allegations of child-abuse perpetrated by senior politicians, are we no nearer to learning the truth? The homes of some of these retired or deceased politicians – such as Harvey Proctor and Leon Brittan – have been raided by the police, but their findings have not been disclosed

How transparent are the dealings of a political establishment which was content to see a knighthood bestowed on Cyril Smith, despite officials having warned Margaret Thatcher of paedophile allegations against him? Councillors in Rochdale, Smith’s constituency, have repeatedly stated that, while everybody knew what Smith was up to, he was regarded as too close to the Establishment to be named.

Then there are allegations that Dolphin Square, a 7.5-acre, 1,250-flat complex by the Thames, was a place in which boys from nearby Lambeth care homes were ferried to the apartments for violent orgies where VIPs, defence and Whitehall officials, Establishment types, as well as Tory MPs (including one cabinet minister) were participants. Scotland Yard has spoken of “possible homicide” being committed. Historical and more recent allegations have been backed by Labour MP John Mann, who first encountered them as a Lambeth councillor in the 1980s, but was told by the police that their inquiries had been stopped on orders from superiors.

Do these things appear to you as examples of Welby’s rigorous transparency?

As an Anglican priest for forty-five years, and a City of London rector for fourteen of those years, I have had more than a nodding acquaintance with the ways of the Establishment. Most of the high-ranking men and women I’ve been responsible to or have otherwise dealt with were conscientious and above reproach. But here and there, now and again, I have come across a chilling arrogance emanating from an Establishment type – the patrician prisoner of his personal sense of entitlement – who believes that a thing is true just because he says it is true.

The kind of arrogance, in fact, which in spite of the evidence, declares, “There is rigorous transparency.”

25 Jul

‘Ee bah gum–there’s Sharia up ‘ere!

When I was growing up in Leeds, we knew Dewsbury as a small town a few miles down the road. A Yorkshire town on the edge of the Pennines. An English town. Nowadays it might as well be a town in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Parts of the the borough are no-go areas for non-Muslims and the social system there is separate development – what we used to call Apartheid when it was practised in South Africa. Of course, we condemned Apartheid in South Africa but we approve of it when it is practised in Yorkshire.

I exaggerate, surely? Well, how about this…

Ofsted’s schools inspectors have given a “good” rating to a Muslim school in Dewsbury which threatens to expel its students if they socialise with “outsiders.” The definition of an outsider is any non-Muslim Briton..

The Institute of Islamic Education in Dewsbury is praised by the education watchdog despite its pupils being taught not to speak to the media and being banned from watching television, listening to the radio or reading newspapers.

This was disclosed by SKY News in the week when David Cameron declared that improving integration was the “the struggle of our generation.”

You’re losing the struggle, Dave. In fact you’ve lost. For Dewsbury is not an isolated example of the Islamification of British life: as Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali has pointed out, many parts of our country are similarly no-go areas for British white non-Muslims.

In this week’s speech, Cameron promised a counter-extremism bill in the autumn to tackle what he called “intolerant ideas which create a climate in which extremists can flourish.”

Meanwhile, Dave, Ofsted, part of a department of your government, praises and officially congratulates an institution which practises separate development. In its most recent inspection report Ofsted said, “The Islamic Institute of Education provides a good quality of education and meets its stated aims very well.”

Too right it does.

The school is housed in Dewsbury’s Markazi Mosque compound and run by the extreme Tablighi Jamaat sect, which imposes a strict Sharia code on students. The school has no website, but SKY News obtained copies of documents given to parents which state that students “socialising with outsiders will be expelled if there is no improvement after cautioning.”

The school’s Pupil and Parent Handbook contains a Sharia section which lists “Items that are prohibited in Islam… such as portable televisions, cameras, etc.”

Where in the Koran exactly does it say TV and cameras are forbidden?

The handbook says boarders are also banned from wearing un-Islamic garments and using music players or mobile phones at any time.

There are no school trips but wait, – it can’t be all bad – there is no sex education.

Mosque elder Shabbir Daji, chairman of the school’s governing Shura – aye, there’s Shuras i’Yorkshire now, tha naws! – told SKY News the school “works for unity,” but would not comment on how its restrictions prepare children for life in Britain.

He added, “Our policy is to keep away from the media.”

I don’t criticise the Muslim governors of that school. They intend to promote their policy of Muslim supremacy and to hell with the Kaffirs. They are simply acting in their own interests according to their own lights – if one may use the word light in such encircling darkness.

I do blame Ofsted for their policy of pre-emptive self-abasement.

Don’t be found guilty of “Islamophobia” – whatever that is. Don’t say anything to upset the community. But it isn’t a community. The word we are looking for is ghetto.

22 Jul

“Not Nazis, but Nazists”–Churchill

Our prime minister Mr Churchill made a great speech today in which he said – after taking a fortifying sip of his Pol Roger – “The enemy we face, my friends, is not the Nazis. It is Nazists. Nazism, as Herr Hitler has made very clear to me, is a politics of peace and love – or, as he put it in that strange articulation he favours, ‘Freundschaft und Liebe’.”

The premier stressed that nothing should be done to alienate the Nazi community here in Britain and he added, “Let us be quite clear about this: the overwhelming majority of Nazis in Britain uphold British values and they deplore the Nazists as much as you or I do.”

Mr Churchill was very passionate: “The fact that a few Nazist hotheads and lone wolves have gone around smashing up Jewish shops and assaulting their proprietors should not distract us from the reality, which is that most Nazis wish for nothing other than the peace and prosperity of England, and indeed of all Europe.”

The prime minister made it very plain that the Nazi occupation of Alsace Lorraine, the Anschluss with Austria, the subjugation of Czechoslovakia and the invasion of Poland were all a legitimate response to our own aggressive policies. “What we need more than everything else,” Mr Churchill said “is a thoroughgoing policy of appeasement. If we reassure the Nazi leaders – peace be upon them – that we have no quarrel with them and that we could wish for nothing more than that they come over here and take their rightful place in British society, then I think I can reassure our people that we shall have no more trouble from them.”

Mr Churchill went on to make the inspired suggestion that we might give Nazis suitable political work to do in such as Tower Hamlets and encourage them to form connections with schools in Birmingham. He was emphatic: “It’s nonsense to say that the Nazis don’t integrate into British society. They entirely support the view that we are all part of one united community. Only yesterday, when I was paying a visit to the local synagogue, my good friend Heinrich Himmler assured me that the Nazis have nothing but the utmost affection for the Jewish people.”

At this point I’m sorry to have to report that there was a certain amount of booing and jeering: “Mr Churchill, you’re nothing but an appeaser and a traitor! Can’t you understand that these Nazis mean the death of us?”

But the prime minister was adamant, unmovable: “Let me say again, it is only a very few who pervert the Nazi tradition of peace and love. These are not true Nazis. I do not wish to see these, our friends and brothers the Nazis, victimised and persecuted, and therefore I shall bring before parliament a bill to outlaw Naziophobia – I shall make it a crime.”

Meanwhile, bombs were going off everywhere. The Nazists were embarked on a reign of terror. All Europe was in danger. There had been Nazist terrorist outrages in Spain, France and in England too. But courageously Mr Churchill insisted, “These terrorists in no way represent the great tradition of Nazism.”

The prime minister then raised two fingers and declared: “I shall not rest until we have secured complete victory over the Naziophobes.”

19 Jul

In yer face

O dear God, what are we coming to?

A near relative of Don Lock, stabbed to death after a minor traffic accident in Sussex, came on Radio Four to give thanks for that “We have been completely inundated. People have tweeted to say that they’ve replaced their own image on their Facebook page with that of Don.”

And have we come to this? I thought we’d reached the bottom when expressions of grief and sympathy at the time of the death of the People’s Princess in 1997 chiefly consisted in the bestowing of more flowers than you’d need for the Chelsea Festival in front of Kensington Palace. And more than half the population glued to images of funerals on TV, relieved only by the sight of hundreds of gross sentimentalists running out into the street to throw teddy bears at passing hearses.

But that was restraint compared with what we have today.

We inhabit a gadgeteered, narcissistic, sentimental bedlam. Institutionalised me-ism. The word selfie says it all. I recall Dr Johnson saying of a particularly odious contemporary: “That man would roll in the gutter – if only someone would look at him.”

Nowadays, if you will pardon the mixed metaphor, we roll in the gutter at the drop of a hat.

People replacing their own mugshot on Facebook with that of a deceased person they never met? That cannot possibly be sincere.

In better days, if we were informed of the untimely death of an acquaintance – never mind a perfect stranger – we would quietly express sympathy and perhaps say a prayer for the repose of the departed soul. The words decency and in order come to mind. Now we do something akin to setting up a gaudy advert – the electronic equivalent of shouting one’s virtue from the rooftops.

It was the Scribes and Pharisees, lovers of such outward show, who came in for Jesus’ severest condemnation: “Be not ye like unto them.”

And that close relative, why did he feel the urge to give a press conference, as if he were a chamberlain in the royal household bringing news of the death of the prince? Grief and bereavement used to encourage us to withdraw, to reflect and above all to be silent. Again the word respect comes to mind.

A death should be mourned, not tweeted.

We have lost all rational use of the word private.

How much further into this vulgar process of electronic abstraction do we have to go before we shall no longer speak to one another as we used to speak in the street, but only the gadgets will do our talking for us?

The Greek drama provided that the most tragic scenes should take place offstage. The word they used for this was obscene.

If even parts of the Greek tragedies were regarded as obscene, what words are left to describe our universal mawkish obsession with the gadgets?

18 Jul

Princess Elizabeth and the Hitlerjugend

Was the Queen a member of the Hitler Youth when she was Princess Elizabeth, aged six?

You might be led to think so if you turn to the seven pages dedicated by The Sun – sister paper to The Times’ – to showing the young princess making the Nazi salute. I don’t think so. The princess, with her sister Margaret and her mother Queen Elizabeth, were clearly egged on by Uncle Teddy – the inadequate creep and narcissistic dandy who was soon after to abdicate the Throne and travel with the sybaritic gold-digger Mrs Simpson to be photographed giving help and comfort to Adolf in Berlin.

The year was 1933, when Hitler came to power. His election victory was on all the front pages and obviously the Nazi salutes were part of an ill-considered party game or charade concocted by the treacherous Prince Edward.

Princess Elizabeth’s attitude towards the Nazis can be inferred from her enthusiastic active service during the Second World War in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) – the women’s branch of the army.

What, apart from bald sensationalism, could have persuaded The Times’ sister paper to make a song and dance out of this trivial incident eight decades old?

A nasty streak of republicanism, that’s what. There is plenty of anti-monarchy stuff in the British press, amounting to a colossal gesture of ingratitude for the unsurpassed devotion to her people and country which the Queen has demonstrated throughout her life.

If the toads and snides in the Murdoch organisation are looking for the hint of treachery, they are looking in the wrong place. But I can tell them where to look.

In the 1930s the traitors were the whole British political class and establishment; every political party supported the appeasing of Hitler who was given a free hand to take what he wanted in Europe.

There was one man, with a very few colleagues and friends, who saw that that toadying to Hitler would not bring peace but catastrophe.

If you’re looking for signs of treachery in 1930s Britain, don’t pick on a child’s silly charade.

The very emblem and image of treachery was that picture of Neville Chamberlain waving his piece of paper, while foolishly proclaiming “Peace for our time!”

16 Jul

Che Guevara among the fishermen

Pope Francis has been taken to task. Asked why he had rarely spoken of hard-working, tax-paying families, instead concentrating on the marginalised and poverty-stricken, he said: “You’re right. It’s an error of mine not to think about this,”

Well, it would indeed be nice to see him take a few minutes off from his effusive rhetoric about the picturesque poor. True, Jesus commanded his disciples to care for the poor, but his attitude towards poverty was rather more complex than that of Guardian-reading sentimentalists. Jesus actually called the poor blessed. Why? “Because theirs is the kingdom of God.” And when he was anointed with expensive ointment, a Guardian-reading disciple protested, “This ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor.”

Jesus replied, “Ye have the poor always with you, but me ye have not always.”

That wasn’t very Christian of Christ, was it, Francis?

Jesus also said that it is hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of heaven, the province of the poor. So you would think that the Pope might be led to have sympathy for the rich and spend more time and effort helping them in their hard task of entering the kingdom.

Francis’ predecessor Benedict XVI is one of the greatest theologians since St Augustine. Francis – great self-publicist as he is and a close friend of vox pop – is no theologian. But he must have attended Sunday School when he was a nipper. There he would have read, or had read to him, the Gospel stories in which Jesus has much to say about the poor, but where he is also seen spending much time with the rich and influential.

He eats often in the houses of rich Scribes and Pharisees. He also eats with “publicans and sinners.” But when we hear that word publican, we should not imagine that it connotes a scene in which Jesus likes to go out of a night with his disciples – the lads – for a few pints at The Rose & Crown in downtown Capernaum. The publicans were not landlords. They were public servants – actually tax-gatherers for the occupying Roman power. Naturally, they were loathed by the poor.

Jesus loved the poor? Of course he did. But he also loved those well off enough to put on a wedding that lasted ten days, attended by numerous guests. Not only did Jesus attend the wedding – with the lads – but when the wine ran out, he created a further 180 gallons of the stuff.

The Son of God who said, “Blessed are the poor” also said, “I am come that ye might have life; and have it more abundantly.”

The Pope and just about every bishop and clergyman you have ever heard are so fond of preaching that mawkish Christmas sermon about Jesus being born into poverty in a stable. As if the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity had been a lesser condescension if he had been born Mayor of Tunbridge Wells.

He wasn’t born into poverty. His earthly father was of the house and lineage of King David. Joseph was an established craftsman and a member of the middle class,

We know the Pope is a Catholic – but does he read the Bible?

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: society