Hope to see you there. The facebook event is here.
The Pirates are coming…
Feb 2
This week’s speaker event…
Jan 24
Hope to see you there. For more information check out the Facebook event here.
Dear All,
You may have heard the news of the Government’s decision to ban the radical Islamist group Islam4UK. This ban will make it a criminal offence to be a member of the group, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The group, which wishes to impose Shariah Law across the UK and recently attracted controversy for wishing to march through Wooton Bassett has committed no greater crime than holding and expressing extremely offensive views.
I’m sure I speak for the entire exec when I echo the words attributed to Voltaire that “I may disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.” This radical group holds some incredibly repugnant views, but it is their right to express them within a democracy.
The Labour Government has taken many of our freedoms away through legislation it has used in the alleged fight against domestic “terrorism”, but this is a clear case, one of many, in which terrorist legislation is not being used against terrorists at all. The Terrorism Act 2000, used to perpetrate this attack on freedom is one of many acts that erodes our basic right to free expression and association.
We cannot defeat groups that publicly announce that “Freedom can go to hell” by destroying the basic freedoms that the British people have fought so hard to defend. That is the very essence of hypocrisy. The society will keep its eye on the issue in the coming weeks and will look at ways that it can oppose the Government’s anti-democratic move. In the meantime, it would be great to hear the views of members of this group on the topic.
Tom Wales
President, Warwick Libertarians
By Laveen Ladharam
I’m going to go slightly off the grim dreary blog entries that you will see on these pages and try and look at things in a more positive light.
There’s not a lot to be happy about these days, anyone can admit that – people being laid off work, the government seems to be falling apart into a 1970s bout of disaster, taxes are rising and most depressing of all, Tony Blair may well be our overlord once again those are things that would depress every man jack of us. But we as a country should not remain so negative.
I myself am an immigrant – moved here from Hong Kong in 2001 – and whilst I love the British stiff upper lip (with the exception of the reaction of Princess Diana’s death) as it is often a sign of people buggering on with life and it works well and I admire the British love being told how bad things are with the ability to stare reality in the face. But there is one problem that I notice with our society in Britain (that I too am guilty of) and it is that we are very negative as people and it evolves into a bout of negativity which can play on peoples’ minds and hamper individual success.
One of the most telling things of this is the standard British response of ‘not bad,’ which according to James Clavell in King Rat is the best British compliment. Exaggeration this may be, but it is a very telling point. Look out for it. When someone is asked how something is how many times have you heard, or said, ‘not bad.’ Often the response to that is ‘not bad at all.’ Now just think how many times that has been a standard snippet of conversation either meeting an acquaintance when you have been out and about, in Leamington or at university and I guarantee that this has is very much the case. What we need is a good dose of Yankee optimism.
I mean I myself do love a good Hefferite rant and I am a religious reader of his columns, or a complaint from Bryony Gordon, but we need to start feeling good about ourselves. No hard luck story is going to change your situation and creation of pathos about yourself will turn you into another Roman Abramovic, only you can because ‘the gods help those that help themselves.’ Actually one of Mr Heffer’s columns a few years ago was about helping what he terms the ‘underclass’ to help themselves. With that, what we need to overcome is self-pity as it gets you nowhere.
One of my favourite leaders in history is Ronald Reagan, partially because of Reaganomics but more importantly it was his charisma and his encouragement of individual enterprise and improvement but in a positive light (not the ‘get on your bike’ of Lord Tebbit or the flawed belief in the benevolent state of Tony Blair or Barack Obama) with his unfortunate personal background and hard work to become President of the United States. There is one story that is sometimes attributed (it may be misattributed, but it is a great story to get my point across!) to him about the optimistic boy:
There was a boy whose outlook on life was incredibly optimistic and his parents felt that his attitude was too optimistic for anyone to have. To see how optimistic he was, they took him to a stable filled with horse manure and locked the door. An hour or so later, they returned to the stable, to check up on their son and when they returned, they saw him on his hands and knees digging through the muck. The parents were utterly dismayed and asked him ‘what are you doing son?’ The boy simply said ‘with this much manure, there’s got to be a pony here somewhere.’
We may laugh at the delusion of the boy, but if we take that attitude with us and keep digging, we will find that pony somewhere and have shown the world that our independent and individual efforts really have freed us from the problems that we see today. And, to paraphrase Reagan, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are British.
Talk tomorrow…
Nov 30
Poker night
Oct 25
Celebrating our freedom to gamble, we will be having a poker night this coming Friday at 7pm (Venue TBC – probably in the Ramphal Building).
All Warwick students are welcome to attend. No membership or prior skill in poker is required. Its just £2 for a buy-in so I hope to see you there!
The Illusion of Freedom
Oct 8
This is my article as published in the Boar of week 1 term 1 2009.
Two weeks ago Rowan Laxton, the head of the South Asia desk at the FCO, was found guilty of racially aggravated harassment. He was in a London gym watching a television report about the death of a farmer killed by Israeli bombs during the Gaza conflict when he exclaimed: “Fucking Israelis, fucking Jews.” It is also alleged that he said “If I had my way, the fucking international community should be sent in and if the Israelis got in the way, they’d be blown off the fucking earth.”
What he did was inappropriate and this is aggravated by the fact he is a diplomat. One would hope that Her Majesty’s representatives be able to express themselves in a more diplomatic manner. He should resign.
What Mr Laxton said is of absolutely no use to the debate about what Israel did in Gaza and it was not meant to be. As the judge said “it was an emotional reaction”.
He was convicted under the Criminal and Disorder Act 1998, one of the many Acts passed by New Labour relating to criminal justice. Here is how the Home Office summarises the law: “A crime will count as “racially aggravated” if it can be shown that it was motivated either wholly or partly by racism. A crime will also count as “racially aggravated” if it can be shown that – even though the motivation for the attack was not racist – racist hostility was demonstrated during the course of the offence or immediately before or after it.” A “racial group” is, for the purposes of the new offences, “a group of persons defined by reference to race, colour, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins”. The Act does not cover religion but it “makes it clear that even where there is a religious element to a crime, so long as some part of the motivation is racial, the offence will count as a racially aggravated offence.” So shouting “fucking French” at me (I am French) even if your motivation is not “racist” (saying that French is a race would cause an outcry in France) counts as racially aggravated.
If your racially aggravated action happens to be considered harassment or “putting people in fear of violence” within the meaning of the Protection of Harassment Act 1997 (a New Labour law which has very often been used against peaceful protesters) then you would be, like Mr Laxton, guilty of “racially aggravated harassment”. In any event should the reasons why someone does something be relevant in convicting him?
I mentioned above that religious hatred was not covered by the Act. This is now the case thanks to Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006. That act goes even further than the previous laws by its references to “threatening” words, behaviour, written material and public performance of a play.
In any event these laws will not defeat racism: the law cannot control what people think. They could even be counter productive.
These new laws reflect a very worrying development, the creation of a right not to be offended. This of course goes against free speech, which after all means not the right to express views you agree with but also views you wholeheartedly disagree with. It is essential that in a democratic society one should be able to offend.
It’s interesting to note the contrast between what happened with Mr Laxton and what happened in Sweden recently. A tabloid newspaper published an article claiming that Israeli soldiers had harvested the organs of some Palestinians whom they had shot. Within hours, Israel’s deputy foreign minister had denounced the article for racism and demanded that it be condemned by the Swedish government. However the Swedish foreign minster wrote on his blog that Israel wanted the Swedish government to distance itself from the article or take steps to prevent a replication, but that was not how the country worked. “Freedom of expression and press freedom are very strong in our constitution by tradition. And that strong protection has served our democracy and our country well”, he wrote. This robust defence of freedom of expression was endorsed by the prime minister.
It seems Britain is no longer the land of liberty it used to be.
By Laveen Ladharam
So it is official. The Republic of Ireland has been harangued into voting in favour of the Lisbon Treaty by the likes of Mr Sarkozy and Ms Merkel as well as the rest throughout the EU. By those who see the belief in national self determination to be an ‘extremist’ and grossly ‘nationalist’ thing that only those love children of Hitler and Mussolini would vote against such thing where your nation would lose a great deal of its own ideals to the ‘good idea’ of a European Superstate.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Europe, and indeed I realise that Europe will have to act together in the future. And for us in the UK Europe has done things that have benefited us such as the improvement of water standards in Britain through the standards set by Brussels (and the privatisation of the water companies). But Europe needs to get that democratic legitimacy from the people of Europe. For instance the possibility that Tony Blair will be President of Europe when we finally got rid of him here is simply sickening – especially as we do not have a say. I must also say that I do agree that certain ‘undemocratic’ institutions such as the Monarchy and the House of Lords are good for us because they work well in terms of government but the fact that we have an untried and untested group of officials sapping power away from our national parliaments is fundamentally wrong.
This is especially the case where the European Parliament does not follow its own laws for instance as a freely debating chamber, cutting off Daniel Hannan in the middle of his speech about the lack of the rule of law within the chamber and a large number of delegates walking out when the Czech President Vaclav Klaus stated that the European Parliament had no opposition to the federalist idea – branding him as some kind of extremist. When it comes to the rule of law, the EU is willing to override national law and extradite someone to another part of the EU to answer for something that is not illegal in the state that someone was arrested – in the case of Gerald Toeben, an Australian citizen who although had disgusting views on the Holocaust had every right to make them in the UK and should not have been put into custody. No country in Europe has had the track record of democracy and the rule of law that Britain has had and the Eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic and Poland have suffered under Soviet influence see the same thing coming from Brussels, yet we are expected to be silent when our nations may repeat the mistakes of history. I think that is wrong. Some may say that the EU has created peace in Europe. Those who feel the need to ignore history obviously have not heard of NATO and its incredibly important role in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
The most disgusting issue of this is indeed that the European Leaders and our own Prime Minister have not told us the virtues of the Constitution but have instead stated that it is not a constitution and not a treaty – even though 90% of the text is the same. It is like a young girl trying to hide a pregnancy eight months along by simply breathing in – they are trying to treat us (and the Irish) as fools. This should make us realise that they know that the two are the same but simply fear that they will choke on their own words if they said so. Instead choose to ignore our wishes and simply bully and browbeat us into submission.
Our Prime Minister has tried to taunt those who oppose the federalism of the EU essentially as ‘loners’ – those who stand up for our freedoms. Well I tell him that this fine country has stood alone in the past, against Spain (with the help of the Dutch republics) in the late 16th Century, against Napoleon for a while in the 18th, and against the might of Hitler’s Germany in 1940. By telling us not to stand up for our principles would be like telling Churchill (as the likes of Halifax almost did) not to stand up to Hitler or even Moses not to stand up to the Pharaoh. If we do not preserve this, the greatest bastion of freedom in Europe – regardless of whether we have anyone with us doing what is right or not – then we are prepared for a master and we damn well deserve one.
John Paul II once said ‘Freedom is not the power to do what one wants. Freedom is the power to do what is right.’ For a man who had lived under Military, Nazi and Soviet Tyranny, he is one with the moral authority to allow us to stand tall in the face of injustice. Sadly the Irish have been forced to cower. It now lies in the Czech and Polish Presidents’ hands to save us from tyranny.
