Alistair Campbell was once famously quoted as saying that Tony Blair ‘doesn’t do God’.

Blair is, as most people will be aware, a practising Christian who, if occasional pieces of media speculation are to be believed, may ultimately convert to Catholicism once his tenure as Prime Minister comes to a close. If there’s any truth to this latter rumour is impossible to say, not having met Tony and discussed the matter personally, the fact is that whether or not that is his intention it not something he can do while Prime Minister for a number of constitutional reasons related to the 1701 Act of Settlement and PM’s role in appointing the Archbishop of Canterbury as the religious ‘head’ of the Anglican Church - which, incidentally, also says a lot about the Lib Dem’s expectations of forming a government any time in the near future as their current leader, Charles Kennedy, is a Roman-Catholic and could not, even if elected, take up the position of Prime Minister.

Campbell’s statement was made with the intention that us, the electorate, should believe that while Blair’s personal beliefs are clearly important to him they are exactly, personal beliefs, and not something which would affect or influence his political judgement as PM. However, as is seemingly ever the case with Tony, the public face does not always marry up well with his actions - Blair may not publicly ‘do God’ but there are certainly instances in which his beliefs have led to a degree of unnecessary and unwarranted bias in favour of religious interests when setting government policy.

Take Britain’s anti-discrimination laws for example. To bring us into line with EU regulations these are in the process of being extended which it comes to employment and now outlaw discrimination on grounds of religion and sexuality, which age discrimination regulations to come next year…

…except that thanks to a last minute amendment that was slipped in under the radar and after public consultations had been completed, religious organisations can still legally discriminate against homosexuals in employment on the grounds that homosexuality may be contrary to their beliefs and ‘offend’ members of their community.

This, of course, is contrary to article 14 of the Human Rights Act and ECHR which states that its unlawful to apply the rights accorded under the Act - article 8 on respect for private and family life is the basis for peoples ‘right’ to be gay in the EU - in a discriminatory manner. Fortunately, Tony’s discriminatory anti-discrimination law is being challenged by a couple or organisations, including one of the teaching unions - union activism at its best.

A more recent example of religious-based bias creeping in to legislation came with the passing of new laws covering incitement to religious hatred.

I have somewhat mixed feelings on the subject of these new laws - on the one hand any law which seeks to place limits of acceptability on free expression is invariably fraught with the potential for misuse by vested interests seeking to suppress legitimate criticism, satire and parody - big hint to the legislators, bringing back the criminal offence of ‘barratry‘ would head that one off at the pass - but on the other hand British juries and judges have, with one or two exceptions such as the ‘Oz’ trial, tended to treat censorious legislation with a fair degree of common sense, as was the case in the late 1950’s when the newly passed Obscene Publications Act was used to try to ban one of the great works of English Literature, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.

On the whole I’m inclined to think with this law that we’ll get a few ridiculous complaints and maybe one or two dumb attempts to prosecute before it all settles down nicely to the right kind of judicial precedents which mean that the genuine hate mongers get their just desserts while properly protecting valid comment and free expression.

Nevertheless, in bringing in this law the government had a gilt-edged opportunity to get rid of two of the most outdated and ridiculous of all common law offences - ‘blasphemy’ and ‘blasphemous libel’ - in fact it was widely thought at one point that these two offences would be removed, at last, from UK common law only for the government to force through their retention on a three-line whip covering the whole bill. Once again, the UK’s blasphemy laws, which apply only to Christianity, violate article 14 of the Human Rights Act.

As an aside, here, while I get how blasphemy works, although I still can’t see its relevance, I’m much less certain how this whole ‘blasphemous libel’ thing plays out, I mean how can you libel God, especially if, as an atheist, you don’t believe he exists anyway? Logically, it just doesn’t work for me. I mean its not as though God is likely to appear in person to defend himself, even if you did try to serve him with a writ of habeous corpus, in which case how, as the defendant, could you have a fair trial when it would be impossible to conduct a cross-examination?

On the whole being sued for blasphemy/blasphemous libel seems about as logical as being sued for defamation by Winnie the Pooh. The Bible, or at least the bits of it which relate directly to the direct teachings of Jesus Christ, contains what is basically a fair bit of sound moral philosophy, as the ‘Pythons’ observed a while back when being interviewed about controversy stirred up by ‘Life of Brian’, but as a non-believer I cannot reconcile the idea that, in theory, I could indeed find myself on the wrong end of a prosecution for making comments on something which I consider to be an entirely fictional character. Retaining the blasphemy laws is quite simple absurd.

Blair may not ‘do God’ in the sense that unlike Dubya over the pond he doesn’t make a big public play on his personal beliefs or use them to actively cultivate a religious vote amongst the British electorate but he does certainly have a pretty consistent track record of making legislative concessions to religion-based vested interests and doing it in a disingenuous fashion which avoids legitimate public debate, which I guess means that what Campbell really meant was that Tony only does god with a small ‘g’.

No prizes other than a little kudos but any ideas for a good caption for this

http://www.markarkleiman.com/archives/_/2005/03/schiavo_hudson_and_nikolouzos.php

In case anyone has any doubts about the rank hypocrisy of Bush’s actions in the Schiavo case.

Never mind gutter politics, the Tories are now digging their own ditches to get even lower than usual - in fact if they get any lower you’ll need Tony (Robinson not Blair) and the fucking time Team to find them.

Don’t believe me? Well lets try the facts about today’s announcement on travellers for size…

FACT: Creating a criminal offence of trespass which applies only to travellers is racist.

Travellers in the UK are made up, for the most part, of two distinct and legally recognised (under the Race Relations Act) ethnic groups, the Romany Gypsies and Irish ‘Tinkers’. Any law which disproportionately targets a specific ethnic group is inherently discriminatory and, therefore, racist.

FACT: Howard cannot modify the Human Rights Act in order to implement this proposed law.

The UK could, in theory, apply a derogation (i.e. cop out) to Article 8 - Right to Respect for Private and Family Life - in order to implement this proposed law. However such a derogation would, itself, be illegal under Article 14 - Prohibition of Discrimination - which reads as follows:

The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status.

In other words a derogation cannot have the effect of discriminating against a particular ethnic group, as would be the case were Howard try to apply one to implement this law, which means that the only way he could legally put this law on the statute books would be to repeal the Human Rights Act in its entirety.

FOOTNOTE: National governments are not permitted to derogate Article 14 in any circumstances other than in restricting the political activities of ‘aliens’.

FACT: Howard knows that his policy on Travellers, if implemented, would mean repealing the Human Rights Act.

He’s a barrister FFS, of course he knows. Saying that he might have to repeal Human Rights legislation if he can’t amend it to suit his purpose is disingenuous to say the least.

FACT: Even if Howard were to repeal the Human Rights Act, his proposed trespass law would still be illegal.

The UK’s Human Rights Act is merely the incorporation into UK law of the European Convention on Human Rights and was put in place to allow the UK courts to hear human rights cases rather them having to go to the European Court of Human Rights.

Even without the Human Rights Act in place, the European Court of Human Rights would still have jurisdiction over Howard’s trespass law and would find it to be illegal as it breaches Article 14. Decisions of the European Court are binding on the UK government.

FACT: In order to implement this law, Howard would not only have to repeal the Human Rights Act in the UK, he would also have to take the UK out of the European Union as this would be the only way to avoid the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights.

Does Howard know this? You betcha! Remember he is a barrister.

FACT: Michael Howard is fundamentally unfit for the job of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

That goes without saying, doesn’t it.

Jamie Oliver’s efforts to revamp school meals made it all the way to becoming a question on BBC’s Question Time tonight, allowing Rhodri Morgan to inadvertantly highlight precisely the reasons why this is such a problem.

Faced with a question which amounted to ‘why doesn’t the government takle this issue’, Rhodri launched into the usual reductionist answer about regulating salt and monosodium glutamate levels, etc - entirely missing the point that simply giving kids decent quality meals is, or rather should be, an educational experience in itself and valued as such.

Come on, this isn’t that difficult to work out - in fact the NHS’s ‘five a day’ campaign to encourage people to eat more fruit and veg has it sussed already - leave the science well in the background where it belongs and just put up the money to give kids a decent, tasty, fresh meal so that while you’ve got them in school educating their mind you educate their palette as well.

We’re not talking lobster thermidore and Waldorf salads here, just nutritious, decent food prepared from fresh ingredients rather than Bernard Matthews reconstituted, freeze dried, sandblasted turkey bits.

Come on, Gordon, if you can give my Dad a couple of hundred quid off his Council Tax bill then surely you can manage a bit more than £70 a year to feed my daughter while she’s at school.

Oh well, Tim’s ‘mate’ Gareth Davies is at it again, this time launching the kind of savage attack not seen since the days of dear old Geoffrey Howe on the back of a few comments from one of my local (ward next door) councillors, Bob Piper - and missing both his target, the point of Bob’s comments (March 8th) and, most interestingly of all, Bob’s follow-up (March 9th) by a good old fashioned country mile.

On the face of it, we have two Labour councillors both pushing what, superficially, appears to be the same ‘beware of letting the Tories back in’ line but look beyond the soundbites and the contrast between to the two counldn’t be more marked.

Bob writes not only from personal experience but as someone who still holds true to Labour’s real roots; trade unionism, a deep-seated belief in social justice and the ultimate goal of improving the lot of the ordinary working citizen and building a fair and just society.

Not ‘Old Labour’ and certainly not ‘New Labour’ but Real Labour, the kind you still find at the grass roots of the party.

Head over to Gareth’s blog and what we get instead?

A ‘Stepford Councillor’ and a relentless stream of empty brown-nosing - no real arguments, no sense of personal values or commitment, just a series of garrulous restatements of the whatever official party line happens to be approved for public consumption at the moment.

I have to admit to finding Gareth’s blog somewhat compelling at the moment, if only because of gems such as this one (from March 10th)…

“One of the fascinating topics that we discussed over lunch was the difference between emplooyment [sic] structures in japanese local government compared to the UK; their management structure places more stress, it seems, on generic management skills rather than specialist or technical knowledge…”

Hehehe! how wonderful is that? Pure fucking Dilbert all the way - say hello to Gareth the pointy-haired Councillor…

Better still is the news that, sometime after the election, Gareth plans to regale us all with his thoughts on ‘Socialism in a time of prosperity’ - stop, this is killing me - as he apparently believes that “there’s a need to say more than we say now about what socialism means.”

This is absolutely rivetting stuff, Gareth - I can’t wait for your dialectical analysis of the differences between UK and Japanese employment structures in local government…

… except that, loosely translated, “places more stress, it seems, on generic management skills rather than specialist or technical knowledge” equates to ‘managers know next to nothing about the jobs their employees actually do’ and I hate say it but Scott Adams got in their before you with ‘The Dilbert Principle’.

Priceless!

I don’t matter how hard people try to dress it up as ‘rational concern’ the arguments being put forward about the ‘threats’ posed to civil society by immigration remain as prurient as even.

Last week, in Channel Four’s documentary ‘Immigration is a timebomb’ it was former Today editor Rod Liddell’s turn to regurgitate the same tired old arguments we’ve been hearing for at least the last 40 years, arguments which become neither more convincing or palatable as time moves on.

Oh the horror of it, we were told, of the estimated 6.1 million additional people who’ll reside in the British Isle in 20 years time around five million will be immigrants… and, as a rather mumbled afterthought, ‘the children of immigrants’.

Ah, hang on a second Rod, the children of immigrants. So not actually new arrivals then, but for the most part people who will have born, brought up and educated in the UK. British citizens, in fact. Taxpayers, even. People whose taxes will go towards paying for our public services. The NHS. Education. Policing our streets…

- Pensions…

So what you’re actually saying here, Rod, is that in just over 25 years time as I’m coming up to my own retirement - assuming I will be able to retire at 65 - if there is still such a thing as a state retirement pension it will be thanks in no small measure to all the Aziz’s, Singh’s and Patel’ out there paying their taxes - the very same people you argue we shouldn’t be admitting to this country in the first place. Thanks a bunch, eh?

Ah, but its not just the indigenous white population that’s worried about immigration - even the immigrants don’t like it. After all there were tensions, alomst a riot, when a community of ’secular’ Kurds were transplanted into a largely Pakistani Muslim area of Derby by the Government’s dispersal policy for asylum seekers. I mean the Pakistani’s were horrified by it all, especially when the found that the Kurds were after their women.

Of course it doesn’t occur to you to note that ‘they’re after our women!’ had been the battlecry of prejudice since seemingly time immemorial and that far from being a damning indictment of immigration the fact that the Pakistani community in Derby were apparent so upset by the influx of Kurds suggests rather more that our various minority communities are no less prone to prejudice than anyone else.

By the way, Rod - just what indigenous white population are we talking about here anyway? What little we know of what might be considered the real aboriginal population of these isles - the ‘Beaker People’ is, as far as I can remember, limited to a few bits of neolithic pottery, a few bone fragments and some ancient earthworks - there’s no actual evidence to show what colour their skin might have been. If we’re talking about the basis of our modern white population; Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans and maybe even a touch of Roman DNA mixed in there, then we’re really talking about a whole bunch of immigrants anyway as none of them were even ‘indigenous’ to these Isles.

Hey, but what’s a bit of anthropology between friends, anyway?

As you might guess, it wasn’t too long before Rod got on to the subject of Islam, his real bogeyman and target for the evening.

Yes, Rod, there are interpretations of Islam which are pretty much inimical to the culture and values of Western liberal democracy, although it does tend to be a little bit more complicated than the split you suggested, i.e Arabian Islam = Bad, Indian subcontinental Islam = Good. In fact there seems to be rather a nasty suggestion there that the tolerance you presume to exist amongst Pakistani & Bangladeshi Muslims is all thanks to a couple of hundred years of British rule in India, but I’ve other things on my mind so I’ll let that pass for the moment.

Trouble is, the examples given in Rod’s documentary are, to say the least, rather facile and disingenuous.

Islam, we’re told, doesn’t tolerate homosexuality…

…but then neither do most evangelical strands of Christianity either, or should we perhaps not be concerned to note that in the US one of the favoured approaches of right-wing Christian groups is to send homosexuals to be ‘deprogrammed’ into becoming fine, upstanding, straight citizens.

Islam, likewise, doesn’t tolerate apostacy - that’s disavowing your previous beliefs, just in case you’re a Sun reader…

…but then conservative Christian groups are no less prone to ostracising apostates themselves. In some strands of Christianity - Jehova’s Witness being one - leaving the church means leaving your entire family and friends behind, if they’re JW’s themselves.

The facts, when it comes to Christianity, in the UK are pretty straightforward and well documented. The Anglican Church is going nowhere fast. Methodism is dying on its collective ass and the sole growth area in Christianity is of the ‘born again’ variety, much of which is based on US-style evangelism or directly linked to US churches and ‘missions’.

Some may well find the insularity of many Muslim communities and their overweening desire to preserve their own culture in the face of our own social norms to be a bit unsettling and to be not quite ‘playing the integreation game’ in the way we were led to expect but on the wgole I find that rather less worrying than the fact that, over the pond, conservative Christianity has schools and even a college which specialises is teaching political science and related subjects and which actively work to place ‘believers’ into every strata of the US government and civil service in order to push the Christian agenda.

Logocally is seems an odd proposition. Notwithstanding the whole terrorism thing, which is a whole spearate can of worms, we should be scared of Islam because its seeks to retain its own social and cultural values - which don’t mesh with our own - but have no real concerns about the fundamentalist Christian groups that are curent pursuing an active policy of infiltrating US civil society with the aim of reshaping it, and everyone else, in their own image.

In the end, all the documentary really lacked was an explicit nod to dear old Enoch Powell.

As a documentary which was supposed to stir up real debate it offered little more than the same old half-truths and distortions that have been peddled by the right-wing for the last 30-40 years right down to the now obligatory ‘I’m not racist but…’ references that Rod used to excuse his rather sorry excuses for arguments throughout.

No, it may not be racist in the accepted sense of the term but, as ever, its took the easy way out of trading on imagined bogeyment and media scaremongering rather than exploring the real issues surrounding immigration.

Hazel Blears thinks Muslims should expect to stopped and searched by Police more frequently due to the threat of Islamic terrorism - nothing at all to do with racism in the Police, then?

Jordan failed in her bid to represent the UK at Eurovision - still if you did catch her ‘performance’ last night at least you’ll know what happened to the Fembots after they finished with the Austin Powers movies.

The front page of Thursday’s Independent helpfully provided an itemised list of verious erosions in civil liberties during the Blair era, but it seems we may not be finished quite yet as, according to Tony, we’ve still got plenty to be afriad of - with all the supposed plots going on one wonders just how long it would take these people to committ their planned atrocities - 45 minutes, perhaps?

For all their posturing over the anti-terrorist bill, its seem that when it came to the crunch the Lib Dems bottled out of voting the proposals down with 18 no-shows on a vote that Labour won by a mere fourteen votes - so much for taking a stand, eh?

The reality is that for all the ‘thud and blunder’ in the press, neither opposition party is really going to vote down these proposals in their entirety and risk a ‘told you so’ scenario in the run in to a General Election should a terrorist attack actually happen - something that Labour and Home Secretary, Charles Clark, knows all too well.