What happens in a democracy when the demos is inadequately educated? What happens when, to win an election, a party does not have to appeal to the people who are willing and able to consider carefully the issues of the day but to a larger number who only care about their material comforts and the childish “news” headlines propagated by the mass media? New Britain happens…

In reality, the government does not need to go to any effort to hide the truth or subversive texts. All it has to do it ensure that sufficient numbers of people are not interested in the world around them. Make sure enough people get a shit education so that they grow up lacking curiosity in the way things work, make sure enough people are comfortable with their mundane existences, make sure that mass entertainment is sufficiently banal to stop people from opening their eyes and engaging their brains. As long as the number of people who can be bothered to keep themselves informed and are experienced enough to be able to form their own opinion is kept small enough, who cares what those people think?

If you want “power” in this country, you don’t need to have the best thought-out policies, you don’t need to be the brightest mind. This is socialism’s legacy: a nation so ill-educated that many haven’t even heard of the classics, where vast swathes of society don’t have to engage their brain to feed and clothe themselves, where generations of parents don’t feel the need to encourage their children to explore the world. This country is no longer run by a patrician elite, but by a cynical class of populist authoritarians who pander to every ignorant desire of the largest minority. Britain is a tyranny of the ignorant.

While this is all true, it is only part of the story.  It is not just the education system at fault here.  Postmodern societies have a tendency to minimise or reject the concept of absolute truth.  There are no facts – just shades of opinion.  As a consequence, all manner of matters are thrown open to “public debate”, in which the view of informed experts has to fight to be heard above the din of chatter from the great majority of us who have no specialist knowledge on which to formulate a reasoned position.  In an era in which more votes are cast for the Big Brother TV show than in a general election, this ultimately means that control rests with whoever has the largest megaphone.  Whoever can influence public opinion calls the shots: government, pressure groups, business, religious organisations.  Democracy only works when the people are educated and engaged in the political process.

I admit, Rachel Maddow is infuriating. She basically spouts off netroots lies as fact and assumes she’s got some kind of wisdom from on high. It’s always pretty pathetic, but it’s especially bad to hear her attack Glenn Beck’s 9-12 Project with a load of distortions and untruths. Maddow claims 9-12 tea parties are politically exploiting September 11, 2001. The events, of course, are commemorations of freedom and protests against Democratic Party tryanny; but the left hates lliberty, so Maddow excoriates concerned citizens for standing up for American values…

Especially pay attention to the Maddow’s question to Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell at 4:20 minutes: “What’s the connection between disrupting the president during his speech about healthcare and the day after 9/11?” Professor Lacewell’s response is typically despicable, that the healthcare crisis, like September 11, is “similarly facing down our country,” and it’s a time to be “supporting our president regardless of ideology.”

This makes me sick, frankly.

Me too.  I’ve no idea who Rachel Maddow is or Professor Harris-Lacewell, but I don’t think I care to know either of them anyway.  Apart from anything else, where 9/11 is concerned, there is no tragedy to exploit.  I’m reminded of Mark Steyn’s comment from 2006: 9/11 was not a shipwreck – it was an act of war.

A lot of the 9/11 anniversary coverage struck me as distastefully tasteful. On the morning of Sept. 12, I was pumping gas just off I-91 in Vermont and picked up the Valley News. Its lead headline covered the annual roll call of the dead — or, as the alliterative editor put it, “Litany of the Lost.” That would be a grand entry for Litany of the Lame, an anthology of all-time worst headlines. Sept. 11 wasn’t a shipwreck: The dead weren’t “lost,” they were murdered.

So I skipped that story. Underneath was something headlined “Half a Decade Gone By, A Reporter Still Cannot Comprehend Why.” Well, in that case maybe you shouldn’t be in the reporting business. After half a decade, it’s not that hard to “comprehend”: Osama bin Laden issued a declaration of war and then his agents carried out a big attack. He talked the talk, his boys walked the walk. If you need to flesh it out a bit, you could go to the library and look up a book.

But, of course, that’s not what the headline means: Instead, it’s “incomprehensible” in the sense that, to persons of a certain mushily “progressive” disposition, all such acts are “incomprehensible,” all violence is “senseless.” Unfortunately, it made perfect sense to the fellows who perpetrated it. Which is what that headline writer finds hard to “comprehend” — or, rather, doesn’t wish to comprehend. The piece itself was categorized as “Reflection” — dread word. No self-respecting newspaper should be running “reflections” anywhere upfront of Section G Page 27, and certainly not on the front page. But it has exactly the kind of self-regarding pseudo-sophistication the American media love. The proper tone for 9/11 commemorations is to be sad about all the dead — “the lost” — but in a very generalized soft-focus way. Not a lot of specifics about the lost, and certainly not too many quotes from those final phone calls from the passengers to their families, like Peter Hanson’s last words before Flight 175 hit the World Trade Center: “Don’t worry, Dad. If it happens, it will be very fast.” That might risk getting readers worked up, especially if they see the flight manifest:

“Peter Hanson, Massachusetts

“Susan Hanson, Massachusetts

“Christine Hanson, 2, Massachusetts”

The whole article is worth reading again, but it’s no longer at the website of the Chicago Sun-Times.  Kenneth Anderson has helpfully preserved a copy here.

Why did MacAskill and the Scottish National Party desire so strongly to show compassion for al-Megrahi, but not for the American victims? Why have the concerns of the American families been so routinely dismissed and discarded? Why have we been shown such an incredible level of disrespect by the Scottish authorities?

Is it because we are Americans? Is it because America has so frequently been attacked and vilified in the United Kingdom and Europe and the Middle East? Is that what this all comes down to, the fact that we have not been shown compassion precisely because we are Americans?

Strangely enough, no it’s not. It’s because each jurisdiction makes its decisions according to its own laws and customs, and not on the basis of how loudly Americans are shouting. Revenge is not the sole basis on which to base a criminal justice system.

Perhaps the saddest part of that for all the bleating about compassion, you would expect the author of this site to know something about it. Americans by and large are a religious lot, especially compared with Europeans, regardless of the separation of Church and state. You would expect Americans to know something about mercy and compassion. As the writer in the Times said: it’s not about what Megrahi is, it’s about what we are. I’ve been clinging to the thought that perhaps we are better than he is – not much evidence of that though.

Quick recap of my previously expressed view:

• Compassion is, all other things being equal, a good thing;
• All other things are rarely equal, therefore the opportunity to display compassion arises rarely;
• The release of Megrahi was an opportunity to display compassion because there was negligible risk or even political cost involved;
• There are propaganda points available for anyone who gets to display compassion.

No-brainer, in my view. Against this, the rest of the world is deploying arguments which are much like this:

• Megrahi committed a despicable crime;
• Megrahi showed precious little mercy or compassion for his victims;
• There is therefore no reason why he should be shown compassion;
• What are the victims’ families supposed to think?
• Isn’t this just more evidence of the West surrendering to terror?
• Etc.

To which my answer, briefly, is as follows:

Yes, Megrahi committed a despicable crime and he showed no mercy for his victims. He doesn’t deserve mercy – but it’s not about him, it’s about us. There was a letter in the Times today that summed it up quite neatly. Mr John Graham-Hart of Cranbrook, Kent, wrote:

Sir, Our showing compassion has nothing whatever to do with what he is. It is to do with what we are.

What his victims feel about it is not especially relevant either, in my view. The criminal justice system is not an adjunct to victim support, nor is it a substitute for appropriate counselling.

Right. Now that’s off my chest on to the next thing. I’m not a bleeding heart kind of liberal. It makes my blood boil that British courts repeatedly let young, healthy, dangerous terrorists wander the streets because we can’t charge them and we can’t deport them because less discerning jurisdictions might torture the poor dears. I never had a problem with Guantanamo – they can keep it open as long as they want until the whole lot are at death’s door with prostate cancer as far as I’m concerned. I have no problem with revenge as a tool of national security, defence or foreign policy. I just don’t think it has a place in the criminal justice system.

Megrahi is not a risk to the public and he’s not a risk to national security. These days he’s barely capable of blowing up a paper bag, much less an airliner. He’ll be dead soon, and it probably won’t be a nice death. Not much leniency involved there. Deterrence isn’t an issue.

Yes, it’s embarrassing that the Gadaffi regime won’t play ball. The hero’s welcome was a bit of a slap in the face. But there are other ways we can punish Libya.

So what’s the beef? It’s about revenge, isn’t it? And revenge without a reason is always destructive. We’re better than that. Aren’t we?

The two Senators made their complaint in Tripoli, where they were trying to sell defence equipment to the Gadaffi regime. The same regime, in fact, that Megrahi was serving in blowing up PanAm 103 over Scotland twenty-one years ago.

Libya in 2009 is clearly a very different place from Libya in 1989.

Those who have loudly condemned the Scottish Executive for letting this man go home need to state their reasons precisely. Does he pose a continuing threat to any0ne? Is national security jeopardised because of this one case? Does it even matter (except that it’s offensive to the families of the victims) that this man was given a hero’s welcome on return to Libya? When the calls go up about justice having to be seen to be done, it needs to be stated how exactly justice is served by keeping the man in prison when he is, to all intents and purposes, practically dead already.

If the people making these noises can’t provide sound justification then we have to conclude that what this was all about was pure vengeance. Vengeance is sometimes necessary to deter future aggression, but vengeance for its own sake is ultimately self destructive. Megrahi showed no mercy to his victims. We should be better than that.

When Labour politicians promise to listen to the people, they prove only that they’re not listening. The people want this government gone: they might just put up with another Labour prime minister, but they won’t put up with Gordon Brown. And so the Parliamentary Labour Party has pledged to stand behind its jellyfish cabinet and its useless leader, proving only what the people had already suspected: that in general MPs will act in the interests of their own careers and finances before the interests of the people and the country.

Meanwhile there are plenty of Tories rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of another year of a fatally wounded prime minister lumbering from one crisis to the next, only in the end to lead Labour to still greater defeat. Frankly those Tories are no better. The country needs a competent and effective government, and it needs it before next May. The economy is failing, politics is failing, democracy is failing, and yet the politicians lack the will and inclination to act.

And in the midst of all this, politicians find time to bewail the fact that there is an anti-politics sentiment in the country, and are perplexed and appalled that the people of Yorkshire have seen fit to send a Nazi to represent them in the European Parliament.

I’ve got very mixed feelings about the current expenses furore. I’ve said before on this blog that not all of the expenses scandals that have come up before the Telegraph started its massive campaign of exposure have really excited my indignation particularly. Some have been trivial (e.g. Mr Jacqui Smith’s porno film), some have been understandable if not excusable (Caroline Spelman’s nanny-cum-secretary), some have been outrageous (Derek Conway and his offspring).

As then, so now. With so many MPs now implicated in this mess, it is hard to judge individual cases because they are all so different, and yet the same: MPs are all judged to have their snouts in the trough, and therefore every expense claim is regarded as an abuse of the taxpayer, whether we are talking about a 5p carrier bag or however many thousand pounds it was to clean Douglas Hogg’s moat, or to procure an island refuge for Peter Viggers’ ducks.

Some MPs, therefore, have reason to feel harshly treated. Iain Dale has a point in relation to Julie Kirkbride: it’s tricky being a member of parliament and a mum at the same time. Compromises have to be made. Backs have to bend backwards. Caroline Spelman’s situation seems to me broadly similar to Julie Kirkbride’s. The last few days have hardly been encouraging for women thinking of a political career.

Having said all that, this explosion of public outrage has been coming for a while. Apathy can only continue for so long before it is either assuaged or allowed to morph into anger. The growing vote for the BNP in certain areas in recent years is evidence of this on a local level. We are now seeing a similar phenomenon on a national scale, from which, thankfully, the BNP does not seem to be profiting particularly. The political parties have recognised this (they could hardly miss it) and are responding with a noisy determination to “clean up politics”, even as allegations continue to emerge day by day. A head of steam is now building up around the need for parliamentary and constitutional reform…

Good. At last.

This last field is the key one for the Bishop of Rochester. He has pledged to serve those Christian minorities in the Middle East and elsewhere who find themselves under pressure. Nazir-Ali is well placed to take this role. For one thing it is an issue to which the Church of England itself is largely indifferent. While much energy is expended on the welfare of Muslim minorities in this country, the treatment of Christian minorities in Muslim societies is an embarrassment. As the son of a Muslim convert, Nazir-Ali knows this only too well. The tepid support afforded him by the Church after the death threats he received in response to his comments on “no-go” areas is an indication of how his contributions have been regarded. As indeed are the personal attacks from within the CofE itself – one former aide to the Archbishop of Canterbury called him “an arsehole” – and according to Jonathan Wynne-Jones others have called him a “Paki papist”. Others who have spoken up for Christian minorities in the Muslim world have received similar treatment, notably Patrick Sookhdeo.

So, the loss of Michael Nazir-Ali to the Church is grave indeed. Some years ago I wrote this:

I wonder sometimes why I bother with the Church of England. I love the liturgy, I like my local parish church and the people in it. But the infestation of pseudo-liberal politically correct values, the increasing anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that is coming more and more to be representative of the Anglican world view, is as depressing as it is disgusting. The bishops are scathing in their report of the influence of the Christian Right in America, and indeed there is much about the Christian Right which is unattractive from the point of view of traditional Anglican Christianity – but American Christianity is thriving because it manages to challenge rather than seek to passively reflect the society in which it finds itself. The Church of England strains every sinew to be “relevant”, but in succumbing to politically correct faux-liberalism it is seeking to impress a section of society that isn’t really interested anyway. The result is a national church which is a slowly rotting corpse.

Nearly four years on nothing has changed for the better. It gives every appearance of being an institution determined to drive out the good so that evil can prosper. Today there is one less reason to give the Church of England the benefit of the doubt.

Blears has suspended official links with the MCB over allegations that its deputy general secretary endorsed a Hamas call for attacks on foreign troops, including possibly British troops, if they try to intercept arms smuggled into Gaza.

Blears last night pressed the MCB for further clarification after it distanced itself from a declaration calling for a new jihad over Gaza made by the Hamas-backed “global anti-aggression campaign” in Istanbul last month. The cabinet minister is still pressing the MCB’s deputy general secretary, Dr Daud Abdullah, who attended and signed the Istanbul declaration, to clarify his own position.

Further commentary can be found here and here, which focuses on today’s Guardian editorial, which includes this passage:

…the government’s chief quarrel is with the hypothetical suggestion that resistance would be appropriate if UK forces were ever used to intercept arms destined for Gaza. Very many Muslims, and indeed many non-Muslims, would agree with that – just as many in the mainstream felt anger in response to a war of aggression in Iraq. For all the undoubted differences with the long years of the Irish republican armed campaign – the abject lack of support for terrorism in the Muslim community being the most important – there is a parallel when it comes to the folly of refusing to engage with widespread views because they are deemed disagreeable.

There are several problems with the Guardian’s line on this. First and foremost, it is not relevant whether many or most British Muslims would subscribe to the view that violence against British forces can be justified here or anywhere else – except that if it is true then it is a very serious state of affairs indeed. Government cannot and must not engage with any organisation which is prepared to countenance the waging of war against the British state (i.e. commit treason). If this is the position in which the MCB finds itself then it is up to the MCB to shift its position, not the government.

Secondly, while such figures as we have would indicate that support for terrorism among the Muslim community is rather less in percentage terms than the support that Sinn Fein/IRA used to receive from Ulster Catholics in the 1980s, to describe this as an “abject lack of support” for terrorism is misleading. Maybe as many as ten percent of Muslims are prepared to support Islamist extremism at least in principle in some circumstances – a small minority, yes, but not an insignificant one. Ten percent of two million people is still quite a lot of people.

The degree to which such views are widespread within the Muslim community or outside it has no bearing on the fact that the views need to be challenged and defeated. Which means first of all that the government cannot be seen to endorse any organisation which will not reject those views.

The MCB has every right to choose who its spokespeople should be. It has no right to expect or demand government patronage in any and all circumstances. The government is right to cut ties with the Muslim Council of Britain.

Firstly, there’s the brain-wangling contention that to thwart the BNP we should actually work on getting more of them elected:

“First-past-the-post actually increases support for marginal parties such as the BNP because it allows Labour to ignore them in constituencies where there’s no real opposition. Some form of Proportional Representation is now desperately needed.” (Sunny’s summary)

Then there’s all the stuff about people “not being heard” because their constituency is safely Labour, LibDem, or Tory. Now, there are plenty of decent arguments for reforming the electoral system (none of which, for the record, I agree with) but probably the worst is the one that seems to confuse politics with an X-Factor sing-off. Have Unlock Democracy got at Simon Cowell or something?

“Right, people are a bit bored with the format of this representative democracy lark because if somebody wins they don’t agree with, they might have to engage with the idea that this collectivism stuff isn’t all about them. So I propose we TOTALLY destablise the system by making it easier for racist loons to be elected and less easy for governments to attain majorities and get on with the business of governing and getting their manifesto commitments on the statute book. We’ll have nail-biting elections every year and the increase in scuffles between students and the BNP will look lovely on the lunchtime bulletins. Now where did I put Cheryl Cole’s number?”

Now, I agree that (a) proportional representation is not a solution to stopping the BNP; and (b) stopping the BNP is a damn silly reason to introduce proportional representation. However, the whole debate here is again misconstrued. Proportional representation is largely irrelevant to the current performance of the BNP because the BNP, unlike most other minor parties (notably UKIP and the Greens), has geographically concentrated support in certain areas (for reasons which ought to be obvious). First-past-the-post works in favour of the BNP in these areas but against them elsewhere. Cruddas hopes that by introducing PR the BNP threat (which electorally means a threat to the Labour Party primarily) can be contained, and in this he is right, especially with a system such as the Single Transferable Vote as used in Scottish local elections these days. But…

All this is basically gerrymandering. The question really is why the BNP is getting the support it is getting these days. I have already addressed this in a previous post - the key point is that in a democracy under whichever electoral system voters will tend to vote as effectively as they can, which is why we used to see massive anti-Tory tactical voting. When people are seriously disgruntled with the Labour Party, a big vote for the BNP in a Labour heartland constituency is a pretty effective way of sticking up two fingers at the Labour government.

What this means is that there is very little that the Labour Party or the government can do to reduce BNP support, other than to resign and then lose the subsequent election to the Tories. Then all of those disgruntled voters, who suddenly have a Conservative government to moan about, will rally behind Labour again.

Obviously we can’t rely on Gordon Brown to commit hari-kiri on national television just for the sake of reducing the number of BNP councillors by a handful. Which means that we might all just have to live with the fact that for the time being we may have a few useless BNP councillors around the place. There are, after all, plenty of other things to worry about.