Exit Europe from the left

Most Britons dislike the European Union. If trade unions don't articulate their concerns, the hard right will

• 
• • Bob Crow
  • The Guardian, Friday 17 May 2013 21.00 BST

A protest in Brussels. 'Millions of personal tragedies of lost homes, jobs, pensions and services are testament to the sick joke of 'social Europe'.' Photograph: Thierry Roge/Reuters

For years the electorate has overwhelmingly opposed Britain's membership of the European Union – particularly those who work for a living. Yet while movements in other countries that are critical of the EU are led by the left, in Britain they are dominated by the hard right, and working-class concerns are largely ignored.

This is particularly strange when you consider that the EU is largely a Tory neoliberal project. Not only did the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath take Britain into the common market in 1973, but Margaret Thatcher campaigned to stay in it in the 1975 referendum, and was one of the architects of the Single European Act – which gave us the single market, EU militarisation and eventually the struggling euro.

After the Tories dumped the born-again Eurosceptic Thatcher, John Major rammed through the Maastricht treaty and embarked on the disastrous privatisation of our railways using EU directives – a model now set to be rolled out across the continent.

Even now, the majority of David Cameron's Tories will campaign for staying in the EU if we do get the referendum the electorate so clearly wants. And most of the left seems to be lining up alongside them. My union stood in the last European elections under the No2EU-Yes to Democracy coalition, which set out to give working people a voice that had been denied them by the political establishment. We also set out to challenge the rancid politics of the racist British National party, yet the BNP received far more media coverage. Today it is Ukip that is enjoying the media spotlight. Its rightwing Thatcherite rhetoric and assorted cranky hobby horses are a gift to a political establishment that seeks to project a narrow agenda of continued EU membership.

But the reality is that Ukip supports the EU agenda of privatisation, cuts and austerity. Nigel Farage's only problem with this government's assault on our public services is that it doesn't go far enough. Ukip opposes the renationalisation of our rail network as much as any Eurocrat. Yet Ukip has filled the political vacuum created when the Labour party and parts of the trade union movement adopted the position of EU cheerleaders, believing in the myth of "social Europe".

Social EU legislation, which supposedly leads to better working conditions, has not saved one job and is riddled with opt-outs for employers to largely ignore any perceived benefits they may bring to workers. But it is making zero-hour contracts and agency-working the norm while undermining collective bargaining and full-time, secure employment. Meanwhile, 10,000 manufacturing jobs in the East Midlands still hang in the balance because EU law demanded that the crucial Thameslink contract go to Siemens in Germany rather than Bombardier in Derby.

Today, unemployment in the eurozone is at a record 12%. In the countries hit hardest by the "troika" of banks and bureaucrats, youth unemployment tops 60% and the millions of personal tragedies of lost homes, jobs, pensions and services are testament to the sick joke of "social Europe".

The raft of EU treaties are, as Tony Benn once said, nothing more than a cast-iron manifesto for capitalism that demands the chaos of the complete free movement of capital, goods, services and labour. It is clear that Greece, Spain, Cyprus and the rest need investment, not more austerity and savage cuts to essential public services, but, locked in the eurozone, the only option left is exactly that.

What's more, the EU sees the current crisis as an opportunity to speed up its privatisation drive. Mass unemployment and economic decline is a price worth paying in order to impose structural adjustment in favour of monopoly capitalism.

In Britain and across the EU, healthcare, education and every other public service face the same business model of privatisation and fragmentation. Indeed, the clause in the Health and Social Care Act demanding privatisation of every aspect of our NHS was defended by the Lib Dems on the basis of EU competition law.

But governments do not have to carry out such EU policies: they could carry out measures on behalf of those who elect them. That means having democratic control over capital flows, our borders and the future of our economy for the benefit of everyone.

The only rational course to take is to leave the EU so that elected governments regain the democratic power to decide matters on behalf of the people they serve.

The vultures are circling after Hurricane Sandy!

Hurricane Sandy: Beware of America's disaster capitalists

The aftermath of the storm offers a chance to rebuild a fairer society. How can we seize it?

• 
• • Naomi Klein
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 6 November 2012 18.22 GMT

Destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy in Breezy Point, New York. Photograph: Julie Hau/Demotix/Corbis

Less than three days after Sandy made landfall on the east coast of the United States, Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute blamed New Yorkers' resistance to Big Box stores for the misery they were about to endure. Writing on Forbes.com, he explained that the city's refusal to embrace Walmart will likely make the recovery much harder: "Mom-and-pop stores simply can't do what big stores can in these circumstances," he wrote. He also warned that if the pace of reconstruction turned out to be sluggish (as it so often is) then "pro-union rules such as the Davis-Bacon Act" would be to blame, a reference to the statute that requires workers on public works projects to be paid not the minimum wage, but the prevailing wage in the region.

The same day, Frank Rapoport, a lawyer representing several billion-dollar construction and real estate contractors, jumped in to suggest that many of those public works projects shouldn't be public at all. Instead, cash-strapped governments should turn to public private partnerships, known as "P3s" in the US. That means roads, bridges and tunnels being rebuilt by private companies, which, for instance, could install tolls and keep the profits. These deals aren't legal in New York or New Jersey, but Rapoport believes that can change. "There were some bridges that were washed out in New Jersey that need structural replacement, and it's going to be very expensive," he told the Nation. "And so the government may well not have the money to build it the right way. And that's when you turn to a P3."

The prize for shameless disaster capitalism, however, surely goes to rightwing economist Russell S Sobel, writing in a New York Times online forum. Sobel suggested that, in hard-hit areas, Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) should create "free-trade zones – in which all normal regulations, licensing and taxes [are] suspended". This corporate free-for-all would, apparently, "better provide the goods and services victims need".

Yes, that's right: this catastrophe, very likely created by climate change – a crisis born of the colossal regulatory failure to prevent corporations from treating the atmosphere as their open sewer – is just one more opportunity for further deregulation. And the fact that this storm has demonstrated that poor and working-class people are far more vulnerable to the climate crisis shows that this is clearly the right moment to strip those people of what few labour protections they have left, as well as to privatise the meagre public services available to them. Most of all, when faced with an extraordinarily costly crisis born of corporate greed, hand out tax holidays to corporations.

The flurry of attempts to use Sandy's destructive power as a cash grab is just the latest chapter in the very long story I have called the The Shock Doctrine. And it is but the tiniest glimpse into the ways large corporations are seeking to reap enormous profits from climate chaos.

One example: between 2008 and 2010, at least 261 patents were filed or issued relating to "climate-ready" crops – seeds supposedly able to withstand extreme conditions such as droughts and floods; of these patents close to 80% were controlled by just six agribusiness giants, including Monsanto and Syngenta. With history as our teacher, we know that small farmers will go into debt trying to buy these new miracle seeds, and that many will lose their land.

In November 2010, the Economist ran a climate change cover story that provides a useful (if harrowing) blueprint for how climate change could serve as the pretext for the last great land grab, a final colonial clearing of the forests, farms and coastlines by a handful of multinationals. The editors explain that droughts and heat stress are such a threat to farmers that only big players can survive the turmoil, and that "abandoning the farm may be the way many farmers choose to adapt". They had the same message for fisherfolk occupying valuable ocean-front lands: wouldn't it be so much safer, given rising seas and all, if they joined their fellow farmers in the urban slums? "Protecting a single port city from floods is easier than protecting a similar population spread out along a coastline of fishing villages."

But, you might wonder, isn't there a joblessness problem in most of these cities? Nothing a little "reform of labour markets" and free trade can't fix. Besides, cities, they explain, have "social strategies, formal or informal". I'm pretty sure that means people whose "social strategies" used to involve growing and catching their own food can now cling to life by selling broken pens at intersections, or perhaps by dealing drugs. What the informal social strategy should be when superstorm winds howl through those precarious slums remains unspoken.

For a long time, climate change was treated by environmentalists as a great equaliser, the one issue that affected everyone, rich or poor. They failed to account for the myriad ways by which the super rich would protect themselves from the less savory effects of the economic model that made them so wealthy. In the past six years, we have seen in the US the emergence of private fire fighters, hired by insurance companies to offer a "concierge" service to their wealthier clients, as well as the short-lived "HelpJet" – a charter airline in Florida that offered five-star evacuation services from hurricane zones. Now, post-Sandy, upmarket real estate agents are predicting that back-up power generators will be the new status symbol with the penthouse and mansion set.

For some, it seems, climate change is imagined less as a clear and present danger than as a kind of spa vacation; nothing that the right combination of bespoke services and well-curated accessories can't overcome. That, at least, was the impression left by the Barneys New York's pre-Sandy sale – which offered deals on sencha green tea, backgammon sets and $500 throw blankets so its high-end customers could "settle in with style". 

So we know how the shock doctors are readying to exploit the climate crisis, and we know from the past how that story ends. But here is the real question: could this crisis present a different kind of opportunity, one that disperses power into the hands of the many rather than consolidating it the hands of the few; one that radically expands the commons, rather than auctions it off in pieces? In short, could Sandy be the beginning of A People's Shock?

I think it can. As I outlined last year, there are changes we can make that actually have a chance of getting our emissions down to the level science demands. These include re-localising our economies (so we are going to need those farmers where they are); vastly expanding and reimagining the public sphere to not just hold back the next storm but to prevent even worse disruptions in the future; regulating the hell out of corporations and reducing their poisonous political power; and reinventing economics so it no longer defines success as the endless expansion of consumption.  

Just as the Great Depression and the second world war launched movements that claimed as their proud legacies social safety nets across the industrialised world, so climate change can be a historic occasion to usher in the next great wave of progressive change. Moreover, none of the anti-democratic trickery I described in The Shock Doctrine is necessary to advance this agenda. Far from seizing on the climate crisis to push through unpopular policies, our task is to seize upon it to demand a truly populist agenda.

The reconstruction from Sandy is a great place to start road testing these ideas. Unlike the disaster capitalists who use crisis to end-run democracy, a People's Recovery (as many from the Occupy movement are already demanding) would call for new democratic processes, including neighbourhood assemblies, to decide how hard-hit communities should be rebuilt. The overriding principle must be addressing the twin crises of inequality and climate change at the same time. For starters, that means reconstruction that doesn't just create jobs but jobs that pay a living wage. It means not just more public transit, but energy-efficient, affordable housing along those transit lines. It also means not just more renewable power, but democratic community control over those projects.

But at the same time as we ramp up alternatives, we need to step up the fight against the forces actively making the climate crisis worse. That means standing firm against the continued expansion of the fossil fuel sector into new and high-risk territories, whether through tar sands, fracking, coal exports to China or Arctic drilling. It also means recognising the limits of political pressure and going after the fossil fuel companies directly, as we are doing at 350.org with our "Do The Math" tour. These companies have shown that they are willing to burn five times as much carbon as the most conservative estimates say is compatible with a liveable planet. We've done the maths, and we simply can't let them.

Either this crisis will become an opportunity for an evolutionary leap, a holistic readjustment of our relationship with the natural world. Or it will become an opportunity for the biggest disaster capitalism free-for-all in human history, leaving the world even more brutally cleaved between winners and losers.

When I wrote The Shock Doctrine, I was documenting crimes of the past. The good news is that this is a crime in progress; it is still within our power to stop it. Let's make sure that, this time, the good guys win.

The Heathen Manifesto

Many religious citizens will be grateful to Baggini for marking out some promising shared ground, but the devil is in the detail

• 
• • Jonathan Chaplin
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 April 2012 09.00 BST 
  • 
    

A man walks past the golden-domed Alexander Nevski cathedral in Sofia, Bulgaria. Photograph: Petar Petrov/AP

Living in a heathen state might not be as bad as religious believers had feared. If I've understood article eight of Julian Baggini's heathen manifesto correctly, many religious citizens should be able to affirm quite readily three features of the secular state that he summarises.

First, religion has a legitimate place in politics. Unlike those on the control-freak wing of secularism, Baggini has no desire to banish religious or other worldviews from public life or to stop their adherents invoking such beliefs in policy debates. So presumably it's fine, then, for Operation Noah's recent Ash Wednesday Declaration not only to cite the familiar grim statistics about climate change, but also to quote ancient Jewish sacred texts and lobby the government accordingly. By implication, it's equally legitimate for secular humanists seeking the legalisation of assisted suicide not just to confine themselves to the prosaic legal language of rights, but also to appeal to deeper and more expansive convictions such as that human dignity ultimately resides in the capacity for moral autonomy (a view represented in chapter 2 of the Falconer commission report).

Second, while democratic debate should thus not be arbitrarily hampered by restrictions on religious or other worldview-based ideas, the state "should not give any special privilege to any particular sect or group, or use their creeds as a basis for policy". Actually, the two parts of that claim are distinct. One is that the state should treat groups holding various worldviews even-handedly, for example by avoiding funding or granting access to one while arbitrarily excluding others. The other is that the state should refrain from officially invoking any worldview or creed in publicly justifying any of its policies. So state officials shouldn't quote the Bible as official justification for the 2008 Climate Change Act, and nor should they cite a humanist doctrine of the primacy of moral autonomy in support of a law allowing assisted suicide. In other words, while we citizens can appeal to such grounds, ministers and civil servants shouldn't, even if they personally endorse them.

Third, in democratic politics, people should "formulate and justify policy in terms that all understand, on the basis of principles that as many as possible can share". Christian philosopher Christopher Eberle calls this the "obligation to pursue public justification" and commends it as part of a wider "ideal of conscientious engagement". That is, citizens who respect each other as equals should do their best to appeal to public norms their fellow citizens can affirm or at least acknowledge as valid, and not just for the obvious pragmatic reason that they might actually be listened to.

Many religious citizens will thus be grateful to Baggini for marking out some promising shared ground. But when we try to specify the precise meaning of the second and third features of his secular state, we rapidly find ourselves in territory that is hotly contested both within and between religious and secular worldviews. "State neutrality" implies some notion of equal treatment. But while it plainly rules out the official "establishment" of a worldview – Christianity in the Roman empire, Islam in Iran, or atheistic communism in the USSR – it is far from obvious what else it implies. Does it exclude all and any state funding of faith-based schooling, as in the US, or does it require a pluralistic European model in which several religious and worldview-based schools are funded proportionately? Does it mandate equal recognition of all conceptions of "marriage" or only those honouring the equality of men and women (or men and men, and women and women)? Appealing to "neutrality" doesn't solve questions like these, but merely prods at a hornets' nest of vigorous disagreement. Neutrality itself is an empty concept that is parasitic upon a prior social ontology that takes a view on the nature of the entities among which the state is supposed to be neutral.

Specifying what "public justification" amounts to is no less demanding. After an exhaustive analysis of what the term might actually require of participants in democratic debate, Eberle concludes that both religious and secular citizens may, despite their best efforts, find themselves coming up with justifications that turn out to seem invalid by many members of the public. And this isn't a sign of epistemic failure, only of the inherent limits of rational communication in a morally fragmented culture. The problem isn't unintelligibility: any passably educated secular humanist can make sense of an appeal to an ancient Hebrew text, just as a reasonably well-informed Muslim can make sense of a Kantian conception of human dignity. The problem is incompatibility; the deep chasm separating one citizen's deepest worldview commitments from another's.

More troublingly, the requirement to justify one's policy commitments only in terms of supposedly "shared principles" can serve to entrench the discursive hegemony of whatever happens to be the current majority position – such as the stubbornly persistent yet irrational faith, shared by every party except the Greens, that endless growth of GDP is the only way out of recession and even the only route to address global warming. Marginalised minorities know all about the power of such hegemonic convictions when their dissenting demands run up against what a complacent majority takes as self-evidently true.

The high principle of article eight of the heathen manifesto has flagged up an important debate. Let's now take up the difficult work of analysing what it might actually mean on the ground.

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Atheists, please read my heathen manifesto

Atheists are too often portrayed as bishop-bashing extremists and any meaningful debate with the religious becomes impossible. How can this be remedied? At the Guardian Open Weekend, Julian Baggini presented his 12 rules for heathens

• 
• • Julian Baggini
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 March 2012 17.00 BST 
  • 
    

Atheists protest in Tacoma, Washington. Photograph: Joshua Trujillo

In recent years, we atheists have become more confident and outspoken in articulating and defending our godlessness in the public square. Much has been gained by this. There is now wider awareness of the reasonableness of a naturalist world view, and some of the unjustified deference to religion has been removed, exposing them to much needed critical scrutiny.

Unfortunately, however, in a culture that tends to focus on the widest distinctions, the most extreme positions and the most strident advocates, the "moderate middle" has been sidelined by this debate. There is a perception of unbridgeable polarisation, and a sense that the debates have sunk into a stale impasse, with the same tired old arguments being rehearsed time and again by protagonists who are getting more and more entrenched.

It is time, therefore, for those of us who are tired of the status quo to try to shift the focus of our public discussions of atheism into areas where more progress and genuine dialogue is possible. To achieve this, we need to rethink what atheism stands for and how to present it. The so-called "new atheism" may have put us on the map, but in the public imagination it amounts to little more than a caricature of Richard Dawkins, which is not an accurate representation of the terrain many of us occupy. We now need something else.

This manifesto is an attempt to point towards the next phase of atheism's involvement in public discourse. It is not a list of doctrines that people are asked to sign up to but a set of suggestions to provide a focus for debate and discussion. Nor is it an attempt to accurately describe what all atheists have in common. Rather it is an attempt to prescribe what the best form of atheism should be like.

1 Why we are heathens

It has long been recognised that the term "atheist" has unhelpful connotations. It has too many dark associations and also defines itself negatively, against what it opposes, not what it stands for. "Humanist" is one alternative, but humanists are a subset of atheists who have a formal organisation and set of beliefs many atheists do not share. Whatever the intentions of those who adopt the labels, "rationalist" and "bright" both suffer from sounding too self-satisfied, too confident, implying that others are irrationalists or dim.

If we want an alternative, we should look to other groups who have reclaimed mocking nicknames, such as gays, Methodists and Quakers. We need a name that shows that we do not think too highly of ourselves. This is no trivial point: atheism faces the human condition with honesty, and that requires acknowledging our absurdity, weakness and stupidity, not just our capacity for creativity, intelligence, love and compassion. "Heathen" fulfils this ambition. We are heathens because we have not been saved by God and because in the absence of divine revelation, we are in so many ways deeply unenlightened. The main difference between us and the religious is that we know this to be true of all of us, but they believe it is not true of them.

2 Heathens are naturalists

Heathens are not merely unbelievers: we believe many things too. Most importantly, we believe in naturalism: the natural world is all there is and there is no purposive, conscious agency that created or guides it. This natural world may contain many mysteries and even unseen dimensions, but we have no reason to believe that they are anything like the heavens, spirit worlds and deities that have characterised supernatural religious beliefs over history. Many religious believers deny the "supernatural" label, but unless they are willing to disavow such beliefs as in the reality of a divine person, miracles, resurrections or life after death, they are not naturalists.

3 Our first commitment is to the truth

Although we believe many things about what does and does not exist, these are the conclusions we come to, not the basis of our worldview. That basis is a commitment to see the world as truthfully as we can, using our rational faculties as best we can, based on the best evidence we have. That is where our primary commitment lies, not the conclusions we reach. Hence we are prepared to accept the possibility that we are wrong. It also means that we respect and have much in common with people who come to very different conclusions but have an equal respect for truth, reason and evidence. A heathen has more in common with a sincere, rational, religious truth-seeker than an atheist whose lack of belief is unquestioned, or has become unquestionable.

4 We respect science, not scientism

Heathens place science in high regard, being the most successful means humans have devised to come to a true understanding of the real nature of the world on the basis of reason and evidence. If a belief conflicts with science, then no matter how much we cherish it, science should prevail. That is why the religious beliefs we most oppose are those that defy scientific knowledge, such as young earth creationism.

Nonetheless, this does not make us scientistic. Scientism is the belief that science provides the only means of gaining true knowledge of the world, and that everything has to be understood through the lens of science or not at all. There are scientistic atheists but heathens are not among them. Science is limited in what it can contribute to our understanding of who we are and how we should live because many of the most important facts of human life only emerge at a level of description on which science remains silent. History, for example, may ultimately depend on nothing more than the movements of atoms, but you cannot understand the battle of Hastings by examining interactions of fermions and bosons. Love may depend on nothing more than the physical firing of neurons, but anyone who tries to understand it solely in those terms just does not know what love means.
Science may also make life uncomfortable for us. For example, it may undermine certain beliefs about free will that many atheists have relied on to give dignity and autonomy to our species.
Heathens are therefore properly respectful of science but also mindful of its limits. Science is not our Bible: the last word on everything.

5 We value reason as precious but fragile

Heathens have a commitment to reason that fully acknowledges the limits of reason. Reason is itself a multi-faceted thing that cannot be reduced to pure logic. We use reason whenever we try to form true beliefs on the basis of the clearest thinking, using the best evidence. But reason almost always leaves us short of certain knowledge and very often leaves us with a need to make a judgment in order to come to a conclusion. We also need to accept that human beings are very imperfect users of reason, susceptible to biases, distortions and prejudices that lead even the most intelligent astray. In short, if we understand what reason is and how it works, we have very good reason to doubt those who claim rationality solely for those who accept their worldview and who deny the rationality of those who disagree.

6 We are convinced, not dogmatic

The heathen's modesty about the power of reason and the certainty of her conclusions should not be mistaken for a shoulder-shrugging agnosticism. We have a very high degree of confidence in the truth of our naturalistic worldview. But we do not dogmatically assert it. Being open to being wrong and to changing our minds does not mean we lack conviction that we are right. Strength of belief is not the same as rigidity of dogma.

7 We have no illusions about life as a heathen

Many people do not understand that it is possible to lead a meaningful, happy life as a heathen, but we maintain that it is and can point to any number of atheist philosophers and thinkers who have explained why this is so. But such meaning and contentment does not inevitably follow from becoming a heathen. Ours is a universe without guarantees of redemption or salvation and sometimes people have terrible lives or do terrible things and thrive. On such occasions, we have no consolation. That is the dark side of accepting the truth, and we are prepared to acknowledge it. We are heathens because we value living in the truth. But that does not mean that we pretend that always makes life easy or us happy. If the evidence were to show that religious people are happier and healthier than us, we would not see that as any reason to give up our convictions.

8 We are secularists

We support a state that is neutral as regards people's fundamental worldviews. It is not neutral when it comes to the shared values necessary for people of different conviction to live and thrive together. But it should not give any special privilege to any particular sect or group, or use their creeds as a basis for policy. Politics requires a coming together of people of different fundamental convictions to formulate and justify policy in terms that all understand, on the basis of principles that as many as possible can share.

This secularism does not require that religion is banished from public life or that people may not be open as to how their faiths, or lack of one, motivate their values. As long as the core of the business of state is neutral as regards to comprehensive worldviews, we can be relaxed about expressions of these commitments in society at large. We want to maintain the state's neutrality on fundamental worldviews, not purge religion from society.

9 Heathens can be religious

There are a small minority of forms of religion that are entirely compatible with the heathen position. These are forms of religion that reject the real existence of supernatural entities and divinely authored texts, accept that science trumps dogma, and who see the essential core of religion in its values and practices. We have very little evidence that anything more than a small fraction of actual existent religion is like this, but when it does conform to this description, heathens have no reason to dismiss it as false.

10 Religion is often our friend

We believe in not being tone-deaf to religion and to understand it in the most charitable way possible. So we support religions when they work to promote values we share, including those of social justice and compassion. We are respectful and sympathetic to the religious when they arrive at their different conclusions on the basis of the same commitment to sincere, rational, undogmatic inquiry as us, without in any way denying that we believe them to be false and misguided. We are also sympathetic to religion when its effects are more benign than malign. We appreciate that commitment to truth is but one value and that a commitment to compassion and kindness to others is also of supreme importance. We are not prepared to insist that it is indubitably better to live guided by such values allied with false beliefs than it is to live without such values but also without false belief.

11 We are critical of religion when necessary

Our willingness to accept what is good in religion is balanced by an equally honest commitment to be critical of it when necessary. We object when religion invokes mystery to avoid difficult questions or to obfuscate when clarity is needed. We do not like the way in which "people of faith" tend to huddle together in an unprincipled coalition of self-interest, even when that means liberals getting into bed with homophobes and misogynists. We think it is disingenuous for religious people to talk about the reasonableness of their beliefs and the importance of values and practice, while drawing a veil over their embrace of superstitious beliefs. In these and other areas, we assert the right and need to make civil but acute criticisms.

And although our general stance is not one of hostility towards religion, there are some occasions when this is exactly what is called for. When religions promote prejudice, division or discrimination, suppress truth or stand in the way of medical or social progress, a hostile response is an appropriate, principled one, just as it is when atheists are guilty of the same crimes.

12 This manifesto is less concerned with distinguishing heathens from others than forging links between us and others

Our commitment to independent thought and the provisionality of belief means that few heathens are likely to agree completely with this manifesto. It is therefore almost a precondition of supporting it that you do not entirely support it. At the same time, although very few people of faith can be heathens, many will find themselves in agreement with much of what heathens belief. This is what provides the common ground to make fruitful dialogue possible: we need to accept what we share in order to accept with civility and understanding what we most certainly do not. This is what the heathen manifesto is really about.

Eurocrats are terrified of democracy

By Daniel Hannan

8:15PM GMT 01 Nov 2011

706 Comments

Shall I tell you the truly terrifying thing about the EU? It’s not the absence of democracy in Brussels, or the ease with which Eurocrats swat aside referendum results. It’s the way in which the internal democracy of the member states is subverted in order to sustain the requirements of membership.

George Papandreou, the luckless Greek leader, is the latest politician to find himself being chewed up because he stands in the way of the Brussels machine. On Monday afternoon, Papandreou announced a referendum on whether to accept the EU’s bail-out terms. He had evidently had enough of the antics of the opposition party, New Democracy, which kept insisting that Greece remain in the euro, while opposing all the austerity measures necessary to that end – an outrageous stance given that New Democracy ran up the deficit in the first place. Papandreou hoped to force his opponents off the fence: in favour of the spending cuts or against euro membership. Perhaps he also hoped to put pressure on the EU to offer more generous terms.

I wish I could convey the sheer horror that his proposal provoked in Brussels. The first rule of the Eurocracy is “no referendums”. Brussels functionaries believe that their work is too important to be subject to the prejudices of hoi polloi (for once, the Greek phrase seems apposite). Referendums are always seen as irresponsible; but, at a time when the euro is teetering on the brink, Papandreou’s proposal was seen as an act of ingratitude bordering on treason.

Across the palaces and chanceries of the continent, Euro-elites closed ranks. Nicolas Sarkozy’s spokesman described Papandreou’s announcement as “irrational and dangerous”, Angela Merkel’s called it “irritating”, Silvio Berlusconi’s “negative”. Such phrases, in the mouths of government officials, suggest purple, choking rage.

The Athens establishment lined up with them. Antonis Samaras, the leader of New Democracy, vowed – with splendid disregard for his party’s name – to prevent a referendum “at all costs”. Constantine Michalos, the president of the Athens Chamber of Commerce, called the proposal “an act of political blackmail”. All these insults were provoked by the suggestion that people be allowed to determine their future through the ballot box.

Euro-enthusiasts in Brussels and in Athens are ready to bring down an elected government rather than allow a referendum. Yet the funny thing is that Papandreou is a Euro-enthusiast. He fervently wants to remain in the euro, and had been planning to campaign for a Yes vote. His sin, in the eyes of Brussels, was not to hold the wrong opinions, but to be too keen on democracy. Leninists had a term for people who, while they might be committed Bolsheviks, none the less behaved in a way which endangered the movement. They were called “objectively counter-revolutionary”. Poor Papandreou finds himself in this category.

Nor is he the first. When it became clear that Ireland was to have a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, Bertie Ahern was required to fall on his sword lest the corruption allegations seeping about him tainted the Europhile cause. He was replaced by Brian Cowen, the former Europe minister, who went on to lose the referendum anyway. Cowen then refused to accept the verdict, siding openly with Brussels against his own countrymen. Result? Fianna Fáil, the party which had won the most votes at every election since 1932, was extirpated.

Borrowing a phrase from C S Lewis, I think of this phenomenon as the EU’s “hideous strength”. Brussels has a bizarre power to make politicians break their words, split their parties and betray their voters so as to keep the project going. Again and again, it makes good men do bad things.

Think of the way all three British party leaders whipped their MPs against an EU referendum proposal last week – despite the fact that two thirds of the country wanted such a vote, and despite the fact that all three parties were promising referendums on Europe in the last Parliament. Think of the way Margaret Thatcher was ousted, by a combination of Tory Europhiles and Continental leaders, when she made clear her opposition to Jacques Delors’s plans for Euro-federalism.

One of Papandreou’s supporters, a socialist MEP called Anni Podimata, argued that a referendum would bring catharsis. It’s a good metaphor. Catharsis is the purification and emotional renewal that comes at the end of a Greek tragedy. Greece has been through the hubris – the boom years, when the markets pretended that Greek and German debt were interchangeable – and is now suffering the nemesis, but the catharsis has been artificially stayed. Greece won’t begin to grow again until it leaves the euro, writes off its debts and prices itself into the markets.

Eurocrats are prepared to pay any price rather than admit that the single currency was a mistake – or, more precisely, to expect their peoples to pay, since EU officials are exempt from national taxation. The peripheral countries are to suffer poverty, unemployment and emigration, the core countries perpetual tax rises, so that supporters of the euro can save face.

It’s chilling to write these words, but EU leaders are evidently prepared to vitiate Greek democracy and wreck the Greek economy rather than allow the euro to break apart. Yet even if they succeed in Greece, they may find that their efforts are for nothing. Italian bond spreads yesterday were back at the level that usually triggers bail-outs. We are about to see quite how far the Brussels apparat will go in defence of its privileges.
 
Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP for South East England

After 37 years, post-mortem proves Allende killed himself

Report on Allende's death was part of inquiry into hundreds of murders committed by Pinochet regime in Chile

By Guy Adams
Thursday, 21 July 2011

Salvador Allende, the Chilean president who was widely considered to be the world's first democratically elected Marxist, committed suicide 37 years ago, and was not murdered by right-wing revolutionaries, according to the results of a post-mortem unveiled yesterday.
A forensic team in Santiago, which has been examining Allende's exhumed body for the past two months, concluded that he died from injuries consistent with having turned an AK47 assault rifle on himself. They found no evidence to support theories that a third party was involved.
The detailed report was welcomed by Allende's family, who have always maintained that the 65-year-old politician took his own life as troops stormed La Mondea, the country's Presidential Palace, during a US-backed coup on 11 September 1973.
"The conclusions are consistent with what we already believed," his daughter, Senator Isabel Allende, told reporters. "When faced with extreme circumstances, he made the decision of taking his own life, instead of being humiliated or having to go through with some other situation."
On the day of the coup, Allende, who had voiced hostility to the US and formed diplomatic alliances with Cuba and Russia, is reported to have promised supporters that he would not be taken alive, even as La Mondea was bombed by fighter jets and filled with smoke and tear gas.
Yet for years, left-wing conspiracy theorists, including Allende's old friend and comrade Fidel Castro, have maintained that he was murdered by bloodthirsty revolutionaries. They claimed his corpse, which was never shown to his family, was riddled with bullets, and argued that an "official" autopsy carried out on the night of the coup was rigged.
Adding to the sense of mystery about the death was the fact that neither the weapon (which had been a gift to Allende from Castro) nor one of the two fatal bullets, were ever recovered. The incoming administration never carried out a criminal investigation, and for years the Allende family had refused to sanction another autopsy.
In May, however, a team of coroners and forensic experts were finally authorised by Isabel to examine the former president's corpse. They were unable to uncover any evidence to support murder allegations, and said his injuries were consistent with a self-inflicted wound from a rifle held between his legs.
"There were two bullets fired at the scene; two shells were recovered, but only one bullet," said David Pryor, a former Scotland Yard expert in forensic ballistics who worked as a consultant on the case. "The gun, an AKA rifle, was on automatic. There was one wound in his skull, caused by two bullets."
The 20-page report on Allende's death was commissioned by a judge investigating hundreds of murders and other human rights abuses committed by the regime of General Augusto Pinochet, whose right-wing military dictatorship presided over the country for almost two decades after the 1973 coup.
Pinochet, who seized power with the tacit support of the US, and held onto it with the backing of Lady Thatcher's Conservative administration, is accused of being responsible for the murder or "disappearance" of more than three thousand political opponents.