Practical Thoughts

Dear Reader, There is sunshine that transcends all the worst stories that continue to emanate from around the globe, but while that spiritual sunshine sustains the faithful one increasing worry is that the physical sunshine is often weak. At least in the United States and increasingly so in Europe. Before I elaborate on that matter, let me take us back to the 1980s and one President Ronald Reagan, and, indeed, his friend on this side of the Atlantic, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It was during that age that emphasis on both sides of The Pond began to be put on specialist 'Think Tanks' to come to conclusions about the state of the world and how to deal with the various problems that existed. We are now living through many of the repercussions of the advices of those Think Tanks, one of them being the development of the financial market as a more important industry to the extent that it has dominated (and nearly destroyed) the world's economy. The time since th...

Dear Reader, The rights of man have been discussed at length by many worthies over several centuries, but I will select one whose impact was in the last decades of the 18th century, one Dr. Joseph Priestley. I choose him as I know him somewhat better than others as a polymath of considerable influence at the time, and who for awhile lived and operated in Birmingham, my home town. He even influenced some of America's well-known names, such as Thomas Jefferson, before and after Priestley himself settled in America to live out his last years. Priestley's fundamental maxim of politics was the need to limit state interference on individual liberty. Yes, his were different times, but the principles of government have, surely, not changed very much in the time since. However, we are lately witness to disturbing efforts in our own fair country to take away a fundamental right of the disabled, which is their right to at least a reasonable level of subsistence support from the St...

Dear Reader, If we could go back a few years - well, I am talking of more than a thousand years (!) - we would find that Britain was made up of various kingdoms, and even of peoples from quite different origins. Now - whether it was entirely through the efforts of Alfred the Great is open to conjecture - the notion and desire was that the land should be unified. To begin with it was merely the land of the Angles (England) that became unified (after some struggle) so that when William the Conqueror took over he found a country that was well-established as a single kingdom. Gradually, other parts of what we know as the UK became annexed - firstly Wales and then (much later through royal succession) Scotland. For some three hundred years there was more-or-less a concensus that the union worked well. And then a loud portion of the Scots decided that they'd had enough of being ruled from Westminster and thought that independence was a good idea, motivated largely by the though...

Dear Reader, I am shortly to be 72, and well-known environmentalist David Suzuki is 79. My name means nothing in the world but the thing we have in common is a realisation - held for 30 or more years - that the old ways are not good enough. We must find a new way of dealing with things ... including considerably more care for the environment. Canadian David Suzuki has been campaigning on this matter for all these decades and still travels around the world to highlight this issue. On Monday (7th March) he appears at Melbourne, Australia as one of a number of speakers on this topic. But ... questions have been raised about Mr. Suzuki's Foundation. Whose interests does it really serve? For example, see http://fairquestions.typepad.com/rethink_campaigns/my-unexpected-encounter-with-david-suzuki-1.html (the sidebar of which asks other questions on this matter). Now, I have no personal axe to grind against Mr. Suzuki but what I am simply wanting to hint at is that even on matte...

Dear Reader, Our financial wizard, our chancellor George Osborne, has been to Shanghai to represent his country at the G20 summit. He has been reported to be so concerned about the state of the world's economy that his first inclination is to apply more cuts in next month's budget. The question I find difficult to find an answer for is that a layman like me could see the world's economy was stumbling many months ago - and there were those far more qualified than me who said the same. What did Osborne do in his November statement? He claimed that he could borrow on this country's growth in 2016 to cover shortfalls due to the opposition he faced on (particularly) Tax Credits. Three months later his first inclination is to go back onto the right foot to apply cuts.  This much lauded Chancellor has perpetually got his sums wrong since 2010 and also applied a policy that was far too stringent. Now he wants the general public to suffer more. The latest set of damn...

Dear Reader, The growing gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us has made headline news with the release of Oxfam’s latest set of damning inequality statistics, which make an irrefutable case for sharing the world’s wealth and power more equitably. There are many ways in which this emerging call for sharing is already being expressed across the globe – including the ongoing advocacy for tax justice, the emergent focus on ‘de-growth’ as a catch-all framing for the great transition that lies ahead, and the urgent need to protect the basic human rights of desperate refugees in order to let “peace and love flow without borders”.  A diverse group of the world’s largest NGOs and other progressive organisations have responded to this mounting injustice by forming a global alliance to fight inequality, in a bid to gather the momentum needed to achieve their stated objective of tackling the systemic causes of inequality.   Meanwhile, the evidence suggests that 2016...

Dear Reader, Today being February 14th is an opportunity to reflect on "Valentine's Day" and its quite interesting source. Saint Valentine is a widely recognized third-century Roman saint who - though little is known about him - is associated since the High Middle Ages  (1100–1350)  with a tradition of courtly love. Now that ("courtly love") in itself was a phenomenon of that period in that it is also associated with the troubadour tradition which is of an interesting source. A troubadour was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry. It is commonly believed that the troubadour school or tradition began in the late 11th century in Occitania (and subsequently spread into Italy and Spain and related movements sprang up throughout Europe). But reading Idris Shah's book The Sufis gives quite a different slant on the origin. The true source of the  troubadour    appears to have come from European contact with a branch of the Sufis, who even t...

Dear Reader, The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking. (A.A. Milne) Whatever you might think of people like Enoch Powell, at least he said what he thought and you knew exactly where you stood with him. With people like Cameron his tune changes with the times and which way the wind is blowing. The professional politician of the times since Blair took 'the throne', has rarely been given to plain-speaking; I at least give credit to Corbyn in trying to change that perception of politicians. But the words of politicians also need to be measured for truth. Here is an example of part of a speech my local MP (Liam Byrne) made to a European Council last week, concerning action against the Islamists: '... [what] we have learned [in] fighting insurgencies is that you cannot kill your way to victory. Victory...

Dear Reader, Last week, a British visitor to the Sangatte refugee camp at Calais was witness to the death of a 4-year-old little girl. "Her heart just seemed to give up", said the visitor. That such a young person - nay, a child - should die amidst all the squallor of that much-maligned establishment is almost heart-breaking to any ordinary person who is motivated by compassion. Yet the UK's Prime minister (David Cameron) - possibly on the very same day as the little girl died - last week referred to the camp occupants as simply a "bunch of migrants". A few months ago, he referred to them as "a swarm of migrants". Obviously he must be thinking that so many have died since that to describe them as a "bunch" is now more appropriate. What leadership from a British prime minister. The world is going bonkers: there's no need for me to describe all of what's happening - the quality press and al-Jazeera are quite good in portraying t...

Dear Reader, Last night I spent a longer amount of time than usual watching TV. But  it's invariably the case that if something is shown that has something profound to say about humanity, then I will try to watch it. Last night, ITV and More-4 showed two programmes about the Jewish Holocaust, 70 years on. The first was about a woman who, as a twin, was experimented upon by the infamous Dr. Mengale, and yet survived her ordeal. She was predicted by the Nazi doctor to have only a short time to live, but by willpower and providence she survived. If she hadn't, her twin sister would also have been killed for comparison of the two bodies at death. The most astonishing aspect is that the woman is willing to forgive all Nazis for their actions. Amazing. Yet the 94-year-old lady has many critics amongst her own people. The second (longer) program was entitled  Night Will Fall and was based upon the huge documentary film evidence that was put together from British, American an...