Poppies, FIFA, Remembrance Day, and Remembrance Sunday

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 122011
 

The people of the UK (and indeed other places) are garlanded with poppies in remembrance of the soldiers who have lost their lives in the wars of the past and present. It is easy to get distracted by the politicians, the large ceremonies, and get confused about the purpose of the poppy and Remembrance Day. It is not about the glorification of war, or a bone thrown by the establishment – it is very much a grass roots thing better shown by local ceremonies.

Those local ceremonies in villages up and down the land involve a few old veterans laying wreathes of poppies at local war memorials built to commemorate the fallen from the local community. A few local dignitaries get involved too, but the ceremonies have little to do with them – they would take place even without them.

One of my favourite war memorials illustrates the point. Close to where my parents live is a small memorial :-

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It isn’t a grand memorial – most villages have far more dramatic ones built in stone. But it was put up after World War I by the local community in remembrance not of the local people who had died but for the millions of men that the local community had seen march through the village on the way to the port of Southampton before departing for the front-line in France.

Whilst a cursory check of the history of Remembrance Day would seem to indicate that it was all a government thing, a deeper look indicates that whilst the establishment was involved, some of the initiatives were started by what were effectively ordinary people, and it was supported by the public at large.

FIFA

As anyone who has been watching the news the last week knows, FIFA initially prohibited the England and Wales football teams from wearing the poppy during this weekend’s international fixtures but later backtracked from this under pressure from a variety of sources.

FIFAs initial ban on the poppy looks like gross foolishness, and indeed to a certain extent it is. But any organisation like FIFA is likely to be conservative and slow-moving in relation to making decisions about their rules, and you do have to wonder why the people wanting to start wearing poppies on their team strips during a football game left it until the last minute to query whether wearing poppies was ok.

FIFAs rules on emblems of a political or religious nature are probably quite sensible, and whilst the poppy is neither it would be sensible to allow for plenty of time to persuade FIFA that it should be allowed. A year would not be an unreasonable amount of time. Yet the England and Wales football teams only recently decided that they wanted to wear poppies on the field – this is a new thing and not something traditional.

You do have to think that FIFA has been treated a little unkindly over the last week.

Remembrance Day And Remembrance Sunday

It is strange how things change over time. When Remembrance Day was new, it was the main day for remembrance although not a public holiday. When I was growing up, the closest Sunday to Remembrance Day was called Remembrance Sunday and that was the main day for remembrance with Remembrance Day itself being a much quieter affair.

Today, the pendulum seems to be swinging back in favour of Remembrance Day rather than Remembrance Sunday. Of course the Sunday events are still far bigger, but Remembrance Day seems to be getting more and more attention every year. It is time to consider making Remembrance Day a public holiday so we can remember the dead on the real anniversary.

Greedy Pigs In The Boardroom

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Oct 292011
 

Yesterday we learned that UK company directors managed to screw the public, the shareholders, and the people working in the companies they direct by getting awarded pay rises amounting to 50%. Chief executives (who do a little bit more work) managed to grow their pay by 43%.

Of course the unions were up in arms, but this is bad enough that even the Tories are a little uncomfortable with the repugnant greed, and David Cameron has called for “transparency” in the boardroom. Whatever that means – after all we know that these guys are greedy pigs, what do they need to be more transparent about?

The likelihood of any company board paying the least bit of attention to a polite request to act with restraint is about the same as the chance of a snowball in hell lasting more than a minute. After all these people are quite happy to be known as greedy pigs … they have spent years and sometimes decades working themselves into a position where they can make themselves repeatedly sick eating from the trough of the economy.

The CBI on the other hand has trotted out the tired old excuse of having to pay salaries sufficient to attract the best in the world.

Which is true to a certain extent (although I doubt that every company director – many of whom do not work full time – deserves quite as much as they get), but is not quite the whole story.

Every year it seems that the top-level executives see at least double-digit income growth, whilst people who actually do real work see far less than that. Over time it leads to an increasing gap between the income of the richest and the rest of us. This is normally phrased as a gap between rich and poor, but that is just as wrong as ridiculously high salaries. It isn’t a gap between rich and poor, but a gap between the richest 1% and the rest of us.

Conventionally we accept these sort of things because superior company directors are supposed to ensure that companies become healthier and more profitable, causing the economy as a whole to become healthier with more resources to spread around. In other words the rich get richer, and so do the rest of us. But this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Sometimes we forget what an economy is for. It isn’t to make the rich richer, but to ensure that all the population get a share of the wealth so they have enough to eat, a place to live in, etc. If there are people who do not have enough to eat, have trouble affording energy bills to heat their homes, have inadequate homes, or lots of other “issues”, then the economy isn’t working properly.

I do not know of an easy fix for this, but we do need to start looking into fixing things so that we all benefit from the wealth created by the economy. And in such a way that the wealth isn’t frittered away. It doesn’t mean total equality – those who contribute more should get more out of the system, but we have a broken system at the moment that doesn’t actually reward those who contribute more properly – it only rewards the wealth creators.

Now genuine wealth creators do deserve to be rewarded more than those who do not contribute so much. But they should not be rewarded excessively when everyone else is suffering (to a greater or lesser extent).

One thing that might help is a way of taxing bonuses and golden parachutes in a way that takes away money from those who just manage to get good contracts, but leaves more money with those who really increase wealth. If for example, we start with a base rate of 50% tax on all bonuses and golden parachutes greater than the average yearly salary. That percentage goes up to penalise those who have not increased profits and have lost jobs, over the last 10 years, and the percentage goes down to those who have created jobs and increased profits over the last 10 years.

Oh! And one last thing. Not all rich people are greedy pigs. On a day when Jimmy Saville has died, it is well to remember that he gave away 9/10ths of his pretty large income.

Gaddafi’s Death

 Politics  No Responses »
Oct 242011
 

Our old friend Gaddafi was killed sometime on the 20th October, and due to doubts over how he died, there are some who are concerned with how the future of Libya will suffer because he was potentially lynched. These concerns are ridiculous.

Of course we can agree that a lynching (or a summary execution … or whatever it was) is bad, and that a properly conducted trial would be better. But it will hardly have a great effect on the future of Libya. However Gaddafi was killed, it would seem that if the killing was done by the militia in an inappropriate way, it was almost certainly done against the wishes of the NTC.

And even if it were the case that the NTC let it be known they wouldn’t be too upset if Gaddafi kept falling down steps until he was no longer able to get up again, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Or even a sign that Libya is going to slip into a barbarous disregard for human rights.

Gaddafi was a special case – there are many Libyans with a personal reason to celebrate at Gaddafi’s death. Enough so that the percentage of those of us who believe that taking justice into our own hands is justified would cover enough people that it was pretty likely that Gaddafi would have met a bullet in the back of the head. That is not a good thing of course.

But as far as I can see, Libya does not appear to be going through the kind of convulsions that happen when neighbour starts lynching neighbour. There are plenty of people in Libya who supported the old regime, and it does not seem to be a widespread activity to put said people up against a wall. Which is a good sign – no matter what happened to Gaddafi, it would seem that Libyans want the kind of society where justice takes precedence over lynch mobs.

Palestine Asks The UN To Recognise Their Statehood

 Politics, Religion  No Responses »
Sep 232011
 

As expected the Palestinian authority has asked the UN to recognise them as a state.

As expected the Israelis stood up to protest about the idea of giving statehood to the Palestinians and undoubtedly their tame lapdogs, the US government will veto the request.

But would it do any harm if the UN recognised Palestine as a state ? And would it actually help make things a little better ? Quite possibly. Although it would not do much in itself, it send a message to Israel that the world’s patience is limited and that it expects Israel to negotiate in good faith – which it appears unable to do so at the moment.

As an example, in his speech to the UN, the Israeli Prime Minister (Benjamin Netanyahu) kept going on about how Israel needed military security – to include the freedom to place Israeli forces inside Palestine, to demilitarise the Palestinian state, to keep control of the Palestinian air space.

The way that he put it sounded almost reasonable – well he’s a politician, so he should be able to make almost any position sound reasonable. But would Israel accept their own demilitarisation ? Or Palestinian forces being free to wander around Israel ? Or Palestinian control of the Israeli airspace ?

According to the number of casualties suffered by each side, Palestinians have far more to fear from Israeli forces than visa versa (although Israelis do have legitimate concerns) – according to the Wikipedia article on the conflict, there have been 7,978 Palestinian causalities since 1987 and 1,503 Israeli casualties. More than 5 times as many.

Recognising the state of Palestine is not going to bring peace; neither is ignoring the Palestinian request. But recognising the right of Palestine to be recognised as a state will send a signal that the world recognises their right to exist as a state – in the same way that the world recognises the right of Israel to exist as a state.

Western Intelligence Services Doing Business With Gaddafi’s Libya

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Sep 032011
 

Today (or perhaps yesterday) the news was out that the various western intelligence services – MI6, CIA, and the French Intelligence organisation – were all “doing business” with Gaddafi’s regime in Libya. My first reaction is to say: “And so they should”.

Intelligence services are funded for a reason, and that reason is to gather intelligence on various aspects of world affairs. And that includes doing business with repugnant regimes in order to gather intelligence on them, and to collect information they have that they are prepared to share. Given Gaddafi’s instability (look at his latest pronouncements which seem to indicate that he has lost touch with reality), and propensity to stir up trouble beyond the borders of Libya, the chief of any intelligence agency not doing business in Libya would be guilty of gross negligence and deserves the sack.

When you look into the details of what the intelligence agencies were up to, it becomes clear that the CIA at the very least was going a little too far in abducting suspects, dropping them off in Libya for torture, and popping by a little later for the answers to the questions they asked.

As in all things, if you sup with the Devil, you need to use a very long spoon and the CIA would appear to have become too close to the Libyan regime.

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