I attach no intrinsic value to national sovereignty or to any group rights whatsoever. Whatever significance or value is attributed to national rights (and group rights, minority rights, majority rights, gender rights, linguistic group rights, religious rights, ethnic rights or whatever rights) are derived significance or value - significance or value derived from human rights, that is, rights of individuals.

Given that starting point, it will come as no surprise that I support immediate outside intervention in the human tragedy that is unfolding in Myanmar/Burma. The deeply evil military regime that has ruled and destroyed that country for the past 46 years must be overthrown to safeguard the fundamental and inalienable rights of its people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This wicked junta now intends to prolong its miserable existence by preventing and subverting the efficient distribution of aid to the countless victims of the cyclone that struck the country on May 2. (more…)

Yesterday, Saturday 11th May 2008, a 16-year-old boy, Jimmy Mizen, was murdered in a bakery shop in Lee, Lewisham, south-east London. He had turned 16 the day before, and this was his first day at work. I did not know him or his family, but this killing feels personal, because it took place within a seven minute walk from my home and less than 100 yards from Lee Railway Station, which my wife and I use every day to get into and back from work. I have never been inside that bakery shop, but my seventeen year old son knows it well. His school is just around the corner and according to him the people there are nice and make great sandwiches. (more…)

The failures of the western financial models

The worst outcome of the current financial crisis would be a return to the status quo ante that produced the pathologies, anomalies and contradictions that are its root causes.

I believe that the Western model of financial capitalism - a convex combination of relationships-based financial capitalism and transactions-based financial capitalism - has, in its most recent manifestations (those developed since the great liberalisations of the 1980s), managed to enhance the worst features of these two ideal-types and to suppress the best. This period has been characterised by a steady increase in the relative dominance of the transactions-based financial capitalism model in the overall financial arrangements of the world, most spectacularly in the US, the UK, and such smaller countries like New Zealand and Iceland, somewhat less in most of continental Europe and elsewhere. (more…)

This blog is a comment on Martin Wolf’s Column in the Financial Times of Friday April 4, 2008, “Four falsehoods on immigration”.

Martin and I have crossed swords before on the issue of immigration. Our disagreement is fundamental and based on different ethical premises. Martin believes that existing residents of a country have a right to control who enters their country. The House of Lords select Committee shares this view, as is clear from their Report, The Economic Impact of Immigration, which asserts that the criterion to be used to assess the costs and benefits of immigration for the UK is the impact on the existing resident population.

I reject that view. The wellbeing of the existing resident population is no more, and no less, relevant than the wellbeing of any potential immigrant to the UK, wherever in the world he or she may be. I recognise private property rights. My home is my castle and I can deny entry into it to anybody at any time. I don’t recognise national property rights. A country is not like a private home. A country is an open club.

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The coming and going of Good Friday and the imminence of Easter has prompted some musings about sanctity. Sanctity is the quality or state of being holy or sacred. I run into a lot of sanctity when engaged in political debate with serious-minded people. For free-market economists there is the sanctity of contracts and of property rights. For right-to-lifers there is the sanctity of life. We hear of the sacred bond of matrimony. We all know of the Holy Land. Holy cities are a dime a dozen: for Muslims it includes Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. For Christians and Jews, Jerusalem. For Hindus Varanasi - Benares – Kaasi. There are holy rivers, from the river Jordan to the Ganges. Roman Catholics used to have holy water (I don’t know whether they still do). There are, God forbid, holy wars. There are reputed to be holy men and women, although I have never encountered any. There are sacred oaths and sacred honour.

Permit me this spontaneous outburst of self-righteousness, delivered from a simplistic protestant perspective: a pox, pest and plague on all those who claim holiness, sacredness or sanctity for any cause, anyone, any being or anything other than the One God. All other claims to sanctity and holiness are blasphemous. Nothing is sacred, except the One God. (more…)

You have to hand it to Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury: he knows how to start a good debate. Even when he gets an issue 100 percent wrong, as he does in his February 7 lecture   and interview  on Sharia law, he at least addresses issues that matter and should engage our intellect, morality and emotions. 

In what follows, I will at times refer to British or UK law where this does not give rise to ambiguity, although I am aware that there are distinct systems of English Law, Scottish Law and Northern Irish Law, not to mention the laws of the various Channel Islands, of the Isle of Man and indeed EU law. 

Dr. Williams makes, and at time mixes up, two quite different points. The first is that different British communities (he appears to be referring only to communities based on a religious faith, rather than on, say, the support of a football team) can and should have their own legal procedures, practices, institutions and even ‘courts’, whose judgements would be enforceable through the British court system. The second is that Sharia law may contain legal principles or practices that are intrinsically worthwhile and could/should be incorporated into British law. 

I will take these two points in turn. Although Sharia law does not distinguish between civil law and criminal law, most issues involving Sharia courts and other religious courts in the UK have involved civil law matters. It would seem pretty self-evident that having community-specific criminal law and criminal courts would be an abomination of the first order. There have been stories in the media that there are ethnic-community-based or religion-based criminal ‘courts’ in the UK, and that some of these operate with the consent of the police. A Somali ‘court’ of this kind, operating in London, was the most frequently mentioned example. These may well be urban myths. If they are not, they would constitute examples of vigilantism that are utterly beyond the pale. I will focus on civil law in most of what follows.

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Voting, like jury service, is a civic duty.  Unless you get a warm glow inside from doing your civic duty, it is not individually rational to vote, as the odds that your vote will matter for the outcome are just about zero. So voting should be mandatory, or at least turning up at the ballot box ought to be - the right to tick the box marked: ‘none of the above’ should also be guaranteed.  Unfortunately, only a few enlightened countries like Belgium still have mandatory voting.  The result of leaving it to individual discretion is too often a pathetic turnout rate.  Twenty percent or less of the eligible population in some European Parliament elections.  Fifty percent or less in US presidential elections.  Such poor turnouts undermine the legitimacy of whoever gets elected and of the political system that puts up with it.

So I will vote, or at least turn up to vote, in the coming US presidential elections.  Will it be any of the above?

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Mental illness can be a terrible affliction. It can drive those suffering from it to despair – even to suicide. I can also drive those affected by it, as loved ones of the afflicted person or as carers for yo, to despair – even to suicide. Because it can be such a terrible disease, it is important that it does not get trivialised by over-egging the problem. Because it can be such as terrible affliction, it is important that the treatment offered be the best one available, and that that such treatment be available regardless of ability to pay. The notion that a quick, cheap and easy fix is available is, well, madness.

Mental illness can be hidden or faked
Many varieties of mental illness, especially depression and manic-depressive illness are not easily diagnosed, even by professionals. This means that it is often possible for those truly ill to hide their condition, if it is advantageous to do so for professional, reputational or other reasons, such as being engaged in an adoption process. It is also possible for persons who are not mentally ill to fake it. There is enough information readily available on the web for anyone with an IQ in triple digits to put together an appropriate package of symptoms that will suitably impress a GP, psychiatrist, psychiatric social worker, psychologist, analyst or other therapist. Lower back pain is the only other medical condition that can be faked as easily.

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The brief answer is `yes’.

I will illustrate the point with the example of Mike Huckabee, the candidate for the Republication presidential nomination who came first in the Iowa caucuses. There are many other examples of obnoxious and dangerous fundamentalism, much but not all of it religious, that I could have put in the stocks, but for now Mike Huckabee will do. Before entering politics, Huckabee was a pastor at two Baptist churches.

Sexist fundamentalism

Mike Huckabee, when he was governor of Arkansas, signed in 1998, alongside 129 other evangelical leaders, a full-page ad in USA Today in support of the new statement of faith adopted in June 1998 by the Southern Baptist convention. This statement declared that "a wife is to submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband." Thanks to my Calvinist upbringing, I know the source of this statement well. It’s Paul’s letter to the Ephesians 5:22-33. My parents used to read it to us when we were children, to impress us with the need to engage our brains when reading the Bible, and specifically to filter out the all-too-human dross that so often obscures its divine message. What made perfect sense for those recording the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) - the religious traditions, doctrines, dogmas, myths, parables, metaphors, legends and history first of a collection of Middle-Eastern nomadic tribes from around 2100 BCE, and then of one or two small Middle-Eastern kingdoms from about 1050 BCE, and what may have seemed self-evident to the Judeo-Greco-Roman first-century CE authors of the the New Testament, can easily become a bizarre abomination in a different age. The passage is worth quoting in its entirety (I am using the New International Version).

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When then Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN that Saddam Hussain had chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, I believed him.  When he said that US and UK intelligence had incontrovertible evidence that Saddam Hussain had an active programme to create nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to targets I cared about, I believed him.  When then Prime Minister Tony Blair went beyond even what Powell had asserted and told us that Saddam’s chemical weapons could be activated within 45 minutes, I believed him also.

We now know that none of this was true.  What is unclear is whether Powell and Blair were lying or relying on bad intelligence - or both. 

This morning, I read in the papers that US intelligence has, in the words of the Financial Times, "downgraded its assessment of the risks posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions with a surprise declaration that the country, led by President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad …, halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 and may not have restarted it".

If this is true, I should be relieved.  Ahmedi-Nejad is a religious fanatic with strong Millenarian tendencies, who is waiting for the return of the hidden Imam.  He is confronted by George W. Bush, a religious fanatic with strong Millenarian tendencies, who is waiting for the return of Jesus Christ.  That’s the kind of configuration  likely to expedite the end of the world.  News that Iran has taken its foot off the nuclear accelerator would would be welcome indeed.

But can we believe it?  I have reached the point that, when an official spokesman in the US or the UK makes an assertion about a fact or issue that I cannot verify directly myself, I really only consider two possibilities: (1) (s)he is lying; (2) (s)he doesn’t know what (s)he is talking about.  The possibility that the authorities could be both truthful and competent is barely worth considering.

Truth telling has become a tactical option in political life. You do it when it is convenient - when it serves your purpose, rather than because it is the right and self-evident thing to do.  Competence is no longer expected of our political leaders and hardly hoped for.  The moral, political and economic cost of this erosion of trust and social capital will be with us for a long time, unless of course either the hidden Imam or Jesus Christ make an unexpected (by me) early return.