Banning the Burqa Would be an Affront to our Heritage

January 26th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Burqa_EnglandA six month-long French Parliamentary report concluded that Muslim dress should be banned schools, hospitals, public transport and government offices.

From the Jakarta Globe:

“The wearing of the full veil is a challenge to our republic. This is unacceptable,” the report said. “We must condemn this excess.” The commission however stopped short of proposing broader legislation to outlaw the burqa in the streets, shopping centres and other public venues after raising doubts about its constitutionality.

…the commission called on parliament to adopt a resolution stating that the burqa was “contrary to the values of the republic” and proclaiming that “all of France is saying ‘no’ to the full veil.” The National Assembly resolution paves the way for legislation making it illegal for anyone to appear with their face covered at state-run institutions and in public transport for reasons of security.

[...]

Women who turn up at the post office or any government building wearing the full veil should be denied services such as a work visa, residency papers or French citizenship, the report recommended. Critics of the “burqa debate” have warned the measures risk stigmatising France’s six million Muslims who are already bristling at the government’s launching of a national identity debate that has exposed fears about Islam.

The Parallax Brief may not know enough about the “values of the Republic” to argue whether the burqa is contrary to them or not, but he does know that the authors of the report have produced a conclusion that is contrary to the values of western-style liberal democracy.

Western democracies are founded on a tiny clutch of magnificently simple and irreducible values, perhaps the primary of which is that a private individual has the right to do just about whatever he pleases as long as he is not infringing on the rights of others. Obviously, that’s something that is permitted to differing levels in different democracies, and which can have a variety of interpretations, but it is a belief which is integral to our way of life.

This belief even extends to activities which we view as damaging or immoral. Having unprotected sex with a great many partners is both dangerous and, many would argue, immoral, but we don’t pass a law to make illegal the activities of the nation’s lotharios.

An example more pertinent to France’s burqa debate is that we allow fascist parties to exist, despite the fact they stand against much of what we believe, and, if they ever gained power, would likely abrogate many of our freedoms: They may stand against our liberal beliefs, but our liberal beliefs lead us to conclude that we must tolerate their existence.

Similarly, in Britain, we believe that people are free to wear what they want, and free to practice their religion, and just because the burqa is a physical manifestation of a culture that is neither western nor liberal, doesn’t mean that we should ban it. Indeed, despite the fact that the Parallax Brief sides with the standard feminist view that forcing the burqa on women — or bringing up girls so they ‘want’ to wear such a thing, whichever way you want to phrase it — is absolutely against western liberal values, he also knows that our western liberal values demand we permit it. There’s no right not to be offended by clothing. A woman has the right to wear what she wants, whether that be a tiny miniskirt and top which covers barely more flesh than a bikini, or a burqa at the other end of the spectrum.

Our culture is not defined by a specific set of clothes, but by the freedom to wear virtually whichever clothes one wants. Within this context, wearing the burqa in a land with a Judeo-Christian heritage is as much a part of Western culture as kids dressed like Sid Vicious.

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Categories [ International Affairs, UK Politics ]

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Johnson’s Decision to Ban Islam4UK is Flat Wrong

January 12th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

The Guardian’s Michael White today used his daily column to argue that Home Secretary Alan Johnson’s decision to proscribe Islam4UK may be against his own prejudice not to ban political organizations “unless absolutely necessary, but you have to draw the line sometimes, partly to show there is a line”.

This view is plain wrong. There’s no other way to put it if you value freedom or democracy: it’s plain wrong.

The difference between a dictatorship and a democracy is not that a dictatorship has ruthless, unpleasant sorts like Stalin and Hitler who do ruthless, unpleasant things, whereas democracies has nice, good looking chaps like Jack Kennedy and Barack Obama who, whether we agree with them or not, do things with the best possible of intentions. It’s that a free democracy tolerates criticism, allows the voters to kick out the government on a whim, and enshrines the right to say whatever you want about whichever subject you want, whereas a dictatorship does not tolerate criticism and refuses to let the voters hold it to account.

The true test of a democracy isn’t its ability to protect the rights of those from the mainstream — a dictatorship does that. The true test of the strength of our rights is how they protect those from the extremes; those that the majority finds distasteful. No matter how loathsome Islam4UK may be, it’s impossible to take away it’s members’ right to free speech without weakening our own.

Besides which, even ignoring the important matters of what it says about the strength of our democracy, Islam4UK must be one of the best recruiting agents for the fight against Islamic extremism.

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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Thoughts of Freedom and Revolution at Christmas

December 29th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Several days ago, over a Christmas drink in Moscow, the Parallax Brief was talking to a Russian friend about corruption in the Moscow’s mayor’s office. “But, really,” asked my Russian friend. “What can I do? Protest? They’ll just use the OMAN [special, paramilitary police] to break it up and I’ll maybe get arrested. And getting in touch with local politicians and writing letters won’t work at all. They’ll just not listen.”

This is likely true enough, and it made the Parallax Brief realize that real political change comes only when people are willing to take big risks. Yet doing anything, let alone risking arrest, is beyond most people. How many of you have grumbled but not written to a politician out of sheer laziness? How many of you have felt strongly in the past about a specific issue but have in the end not protested or even joined activist groups?

The Parallax Brief knows he falls into this category.

If this is the case in a liberal democracy like ours, think of the incredible bravery it must take to stand up to a brutal and cold-hearted regime like that in Iran. Young Iranians are currently risking everything for freedom and the right to hold to account those who rule their country. For this, they are being beaten, arrested, tortured, and killed. And still they will not be silenced.

These Iranian freedom fighters are heroes, and we should remember this as news from Iran develops over the holiday period.

Yet, the nascent Green Revolution should also have taught us in the west an important lesson.

The Parallax Brief thinks it’s fair to say than when John McCain danced onto stage singing “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys hit Barbara Allen, most sensible people would have felt a combination of juddering horror at the depth of geopolitical aggression in some quarters in the US and mirth at the senile, slobbering old warmonger.

That may be, but there was then, and there is now, a growing chorus of US foreign policy hawks arguing that — at the very least — tactical bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is now, or in the very near future will be, necessary to deal with the threat that Iranian nuclear weapons ambitions.

The Iran protesters are making apparent just what folly that thinking is. If US or Israel had dropped bombs on Iran, those young man would be currently venting their not insignificant frustrations at the west, rather than their own, disgusting government — and worse, their government would have a rallying call to unify the country.

Meantime, Iran isn’t the only place in which revolution may be formenting. That most oppressive regime of all — the one which was seemingly named with a nod to George Orwell — the “People’s Democratic Republic” of Korea, is also in trouble. For those who haven’t heard, Kim and his cronies have decided to devalue the currency. First, this serves the useful purpose of lopping a few zeros off the Won, but more important, it will flatten the entrepreneurs who have set up black markets in a variety of goods — taking away their savings and cutting the incentives to enter into free-marketeering. But North Koreans with access to the markets often relied on them as the only reliable source of certain essentials, such as food and clothing, and are therefore unhappy with the devaluation.

Blaine Harden of the Washington Post explains:

Grass-roots anger and a reported riot in an eastern coastal city pressured the government to amend its confiscatory policy. Exchange limits have been eased, allowing individuals to possess more cash.

The currency episode reveals new constraints on Kim’s power and may signal a fundamental change in the operation of what is often called the world’s most repressive state. The change is driven by private markets that now feed and employ half the country’s 23.5 million people, and appear to have grown too big and too important to be crushed, even by a leader who loathes them….

The currency episode seems far from over, and there have been indications that Kim still has the stomach for using deadly force.

There have been public executions and reinforcements have been dispatched to the Chinese border to stop possible mass defections, according to reports in Seoul-based newspapers and aid groups with informants in the North.

Still, analysts say there has also been evidence of unexpected shifts in the limits of Kim’s authority.

“The private markets have created a new power elite,” said Koh Yu-whan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. “They pay bribes to bureaucrats in Kim’s government, and they are a threat that is not going away.”

Orwell may have proven in his crushing masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four that there is nothing logically finite about dictatorships, but experience tells us that they all fall eventually.

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Categories [ International Affairs ]

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A Victory for Brown and a Damning Indictment of the European Union

November 20th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

So, the EU heads of state and the cabal of unaccountable bureaucrats chose anonymous and anonymous-er as the President and High Representative of the European Union, respectively, yesterday in Brussels. The decision, which saw one-year Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy chosen for the top spot, and Britain’s EU Trade Commissioner, Baroness Ashton, for the High Representative slot, was a victory for bland, consensus politics, and Gordon Brown. It was also pungent with the smell of Platonic ‘benevolent’ tyranny, and as such a damning indictment of the European Union as it is currently constituted.

Mr. Von Rompuy, a Christian Democrat, was clearly taken specifically because of his blandness. Having only been in office in Belgium for one year, he has had little chance to make enemies in the EU; further, he has no strong foreign policy views that could divide the EU. Tellingly, appointing a man with little foreign policy experience is indicative of an EU which does not want a Presidential traffic stopper to vigorously represent the EU’s interests to the mighty ‘G2′, but rather a secretary general type figure who will be adept at massaging consensus out of the disparate foreign policy aims of the EU’s member states.

More interestingly, Charlemagne, the Economist’s Europe columnist notes, in the most instructive analysis currently available on the net:

I think it also means that today’s European leaders have little ambition to use the EU to talk to the world, at least not at the highest level. Instead, they know their voters want to use the union as a “Europe that protects”, a Europe that makes the world go away. This Europe is an ageing, rich and frightened place, that wants to spend its money on Frontex border guards to keep the poor of the world away. It wants to devote 40% of the EU budget to subsidising farmers against global competition. This Europe rejects the strategic arguments in favour of opening the union to Turkey (one of the few known positions on foreign policy ascribed to Mr Van Rompuy is that he thinks Turkey can never be part of the EU)…

They wanted someone to reach consensus among leaders on big subjects of internal, domestic interest. They wanted someone who did not overshadow national leaders, but acted as a secretary general for their summits.

Continuing the theme, Charlemagne argues that Lady Ashton is also likely to have been chosen because of her utility to a potentially inward looking EU. He notes that many within the EU — especially the French — who seek to drive forward a combined EU military, view Britain’s involvement in any defence force as essential. It follows, therefore, that one of the top slots should go to a Briton.

Beyond that, it is probable that Lady Ashton was chosen because she, too, is inoffensive and bland, because she is a woman and a centre-left politician and therefore balances the ticket on two counts, and that she’s become quietly popular among EU grandees and career bureaucrats. Gordon Brown will be ecstatic that his tactic of continuing to push for Tony Blair, despite knowing that he could not win, in order to be able to claim ‘compensation’ has paid off.

But this shouldn’t disguise to British voters that the whole process, and the decision it has yielded, has been a risible, asinine fudge.

Both positions have been filled with no democratic component, by individuals chosen for their anonymity and political innocuousness, who will have no accountability to the half billion people they represent. Lady Ashton has never held elected office.

Even europhiles can’t be happy with this insipid subjugation.

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Categories [ Economics and Finance ]

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The Boy Next Door and Parliamentary Reform

October 27th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Iain Dale blogged yesterday about whether an MP should be expected to be local – or resident – in his or her constituency:

“All I know is that I can only apply for constituencies which I feel I can connect with, and which I have some affinity with. However, some commenters on here seem to think that unless you can prove you have lived somewhere all your life you should be excluded from applying. Rubbish. Was Margaret Thatcher a bad MP for Finchley? Is Nick Clegg a bad constituency MP because he doesn’t come from Sheffield? Does anyone think David Ed Miliband can’t represent Doncaster properly because he isn’t a local?

And anyway, what constitutes local? Phillip Lee lived 10 miles from Bracknell and so had a claim to be a local, yet living 5 miles outside Henley was enough to bar him from applying to be the candidate there in the by-election – not local enough, you see.

I live twenty minutes from Beckenham and Orpington. Does that make me a local or an outsider? Is that really the main criteria by which we should be judging a candidate? Shouldn’t we be picking candidates who can do the best job in representing a constituency and who would make the best parliamentarians? That person may or may not be local to the area at the time of selection.”

But isn’t this the problem with Britain’s democracy as currently constituted? Twice, it conflates two distinct branches of government that should be kept separate. The first conflation is the legislative and the executive. The Prime Minister — the de facto chief executive — also votes in the legislative. In effect, it means he’s a lawmaker and head of state. Ditto for cabinet members and ministers.

The second conflation is that of the local or national interest. Should voters vote for their favourite candidate or national party? Should an MP do what’s best for the constituency or acquiesce to the party whip? And how can parties — especially smaller ones — provide safe seats to leading parliamentary members without parachuting them into constituencies with which they have no natural affinity?

These issues could be solved by keeping a lower house with a first past the post system — which lends itself to strong, independent, personalities — and electing the upper house by simple national popular vote (on a separate ballot paper), with members elected from lists set out by the parties, presumably with the leader top, and prospective cabinet members next down.

That way, voters could genuinely vote for their favourite local candidate, while voting for their preferred national party; MPs could vote for what they believed was best for their local constituency, while upper house members concentrated on the matters of governing the country or cross-examining the executive; and the parties would avoid strong arm tactics for securing their leading lights safe seats.

Meanwhile, the upper house would become immediately more democratic — as would Britain in general by finally recognising the popular vote — the lower house would be more in touch with its constituencies, and parliament could even become more representative, as lists would allow the parties to include more women without resorting to all women shortlists for constituencies.

Just an idea.

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