Babies are millions of years old
While in America a few weeks ago I listened to the talk radio stations. Without exception the shows I listened to were hosted by fanatics who condemned their opponents as not only wrong but intentionally evil. On one side the U.S. Government were conniving with BP to enrich themselves while deliberately destroying the environment. Another side blamed the liberals for deliberately lying about climate change in order to destroy the American way and allow other countries to impinge on America sovereignty. The abortion debate is one of the most acrimonious. Fiendish liberals murder babies while tyrannical misogynists seek to inflict back street abortions on young women.
Over the years British politics seems to be becoming similar to that of America. (All this dull witted talk of “progressive politics” is an American import). Listening to LBC radio this morning one guy was claiming that the Tories are a party obsessed with making the rich richer while Labour are portrayed as wanting to destroy industry.
When one tries to argue (as reasonably as one can) against one of the extreme views one is immediately cast as representing the opposite extreme view. When I blogged about the gross incompetence of the New Labour government I was branded as a racist an a fascist. If I complain about the corruption of the corporate world I am branded a communist.
Let me explain something to all extremists: You are all TALKING BOLLOCKS!
Most argument are not straight black and white and most people are capable of understanding that both sides in most debates have valid arguments and that decisions must be taken which attempt to ameliorate the downside of both arguments while accentuating the good. So why do the politicians insist on playing these idiotic games of simplifying arguments to a level that only an imbecile would agree with?
Take the abortion debate for example. One side believes that life begins at conception and that it is always wrong to take life. The other side believes that a woman’s body is her own to do with as she wishes so if she wants an abortion she should have one.
Both are Talking Bollocks!
Firstly it is ridiculous to say that life begins at conception. A sperm is alive and an egg is alive. Life is a continuum. One unappreciated fact about the human race is that we are all one continuous stream of life going back thousands, if not, millions of years. Its amazing! It fantastic! Its a far bigger idea than a man with a beard who did everything and it means that a new born baby is a million years old! – Cool!
Listen to Unbroken Chain by the Grateful Dead which, I’m told, is inspired by this idea.
Secondly yes, a woman’s body is her own to do with as she wishes but at some point one has to realise that she is carrying a child. What are you going to do, allow abortion up to 1 minute before delivery? At this point the accusation is usually this is unfair as I am a man and therefore will never be put in this position. Sorry, I know it’s unfair but it’s still true.
As I said, these are the two extremes but anyone with any intelligence can see that there is validity in both arguments and this is what I find so annoying: That the bellicose imbeciles who insist on inflicting their bigoted opinions upon us refuse to even acknowledge the obvious truth in their opponents arguments. Yes life should be treated as sacred but yes a woman should have control of her own body so the law should probably be something like that which we have at the moment: Not “abortion on demand” but limited according to strict criteria.
Immigration is another debate where our politicians behave like hooligans. Yes, the United Kingdom is crowded and our resources are over stretched but no, it’s not true that we should judge people by their race or religion. (Whatever race is supposed to mean – I thought there was only one race, the human race – I thought that most of your also worshipped the same God so I don’t know why you bicker about minor implementation differences). So when one politicians argues against immigration he is not necessarily a fascists and another argues in favour of immigration they are not necessarily hell bent on destroying British culture. My personal view is that the racists debate has become so stylised and dangerous that prejudice is rampant on both sides of the debate.
One reason I support the current coalition government (so far) is that it is trying to run more heterogeneous politics. It is OK to have opposing views on some issues while agreeing and proceeding on others. In the end every member of the House of Commons is allowed to vote on a bill so if enough MPs (Tory, Liberal or Labour) oppose the bill it wont get through.
What we require from politicians is an end to the mindless demonising of their opponents and reasoned, intelligent debate culminating in a vote where the decision is accepted by all.
Democracy, I think it’s called.
The acceptable argument for immigration seems to be that immigrants should only be allowed into the UK if our economy requires their skills.
Photography
overcrowded Britain
Tags: balance sheet, Business, Capitalism, cheap labour, competitiveness, corporate profits, economists, EU, Financial Times, forests, Foundation, George Osbourne, house prices, housing, immigration, immigration. economic migrants, Isaac Asimov, Lack London, london, new labour, overcrowding, overpopulated, overpopulation, People Of The Abyss, Trantor, Unaffordable housing
What passes for a kitchen in Hackney
A front page article in the Financial Times (FT) on the 21st November reported that a bunch of “leading economists” had written a letter to the British Chancellor, George Osbourne, urging him to rethink his plans to curb immigration. Mr. Osbourne is planning to limit economic migrants entering the UK from outside the EU and the economists believe that this would be “deeply damaging to the competitiveness of our science and research sectors and the wider economy”.
The UK had 13 years of New Labour during which immigration was used to provide cheap skilled workers to business mitigating the need to properly educate the indigenous workforce. This is obviously not a sustainable policy and will merely store up trouble for the future as British people sit on their arses and let Johnny Foreigner do all the work.
The restrictions to be brought in are for non-EU citizens so British business would still have the entire population of the EU from which to draw its workers. That means the economists believe that the educated percentage of a total population of around 500 million people is not sufficient for the British economy!
What utter tosh!
If 500 million are not enough then why should we believe that a world of 7 billion people is? Perhaps, if we looked hard, we could find an even dafter set of economists who believe that UK business needs the educated population of 10 Earth size planets.
The truth is that large corporations are driven by the need for profit and this means limiting costs. Land and labour are major costs and so it is most efficient for corporations to build mega office complexes and have the entire planet as a pool of potential employees. It’s even more profitable if the workforce are educated at someone else’s expense.
I’m sure the economists are all clever gentlemen but my experience is that bean counters only count beans. By this I mean they only count that which can be counted. However, some resources cannot be quantified and the top of my list is housing. House prices in London have more than tripled in 14 years and are still way over priced as discussed in an article in The Economist in 26th November.
Since a basic tenet of capitalism is that increased demand and fixed supply drives up the price of an asset. The deliberate importing of people into the UK may support corporate profits but it will also provide upward pressure on housing.
Corporations push the idea that capitalism creates wealth for the population and this can sometimes be true. At the moment, in China, capitalism is helping raise many people out of poverty. But read a book like The People Of The Abyss by Jack London and you realise that, at the height of the British Empire, which was powered by capitalism, the lives of the people living in the east end of London were worse than Australian aboriginals on the other side of the world living as hunter-gatherers.
The People Of The Abys shows capitalism at its rawest, un-tempered by socialism or the fears of socialism. It shows that the welfare of a population is not directly related to the profits of business.
Over the past decade or so, while businesses earned fat profits, ordinary people had to endure costs which did not appear on the balance sheets of any businessmen or politician. Unaffordable housing is just one example but the ordinary worker must also endure standing like tinned sardines on Bakerloo Line trains from London Bridge on a Saturday evening. We must sit in traffic jams. We must stand in rush hour queues, not to get on the train, not to get on the platform, not to get on to the escalator but to get into the bloody station!
All this boils down to supply of land and it is possible to argue that the UK should release more land for building to ease congestion and prices. This would be fine were the UK the size of the United States. It isn’t. Open up Google Earth and have a fly over the UK. Most of the land is either farm land or already built upon. There are very few patches of wilderness. Scotland is more thinly populated and we could just shrug and decide that we will give over the entire UK to human needs. The UK could become the first concrete country.
In 1951 Isaac Asimov published the first of his Foundation series of Science Fiction novels which portrayed a world known as Trantor which was completely covered in metal. The whole planet had been taken up by humans for homes or factories or offices. Food and raw materials were shipped in from other worlds.
I don’t want to live in a country without wilderness. I do not want to live on Trantor!
The pro-immigration lobby scoff and say that it will be centuries before we even approach a situation resembling the planet Trantor. True but then can they give us an indication of when we are going to stop building?
A couple of hundred years ago England was covered in forest and someone argued that we should chop down just this little bit more wilderness and give it over to some landowner to farm. They probably said “…but England is covered in forest, it will be centuries before it is all chopped down….”. They were right; it did take centuries.
But HELLO! here we are centuries later and the forests are gone.
On the 24 November 2011 the BBC reported that annual net migration to the UK hit a record high in 2010 at 252,000 though the figure may have now fallen to something more like 245,000. Growth is often expressed as a percentage but a more enlightening indicator of growth is “doubling period”. i.e. The time it takes for a population to double in size? The UK’s current population stands at about 62 million. If the current population carried on at replacement level and if the population only grew by the current immigration rate then the population would double in about 255 years.
That’s about nine generations if we take a generation as 28 years. By 2265 the UK would have a population of 124,500,000 and our descendants (that’s the grandchildren of our grandchildren’s grandchildren) will look back and wonder what the hell we thought we were doing.
One by one the trees are cut down. Little by little our forests were destroyed. Little by little forest becomes farm. Little by little farms become houses and offices. Little by little we accept smaller seats on buses and no leg room on trains. Little by little we trade space for gadgets. Little by little we are squeezed into chickens runs and little by little the UK becomes grossly overpopulated.
I’m sure that it’s true that adding 10% more workers to London and letting them live like factory hens would make London’s corporations more profitable. Londoners may even acquire more tablet computers and smart phones. Yet our lives would be worse! Already the definition of a kitchen in a flat in Hackney is a line of cupboards down the side of the living room. Just how many times can they divide up these beautiful old houses into smaller and smaller boxes?
The mistake that these economists make is to become totally business centric. Their analysis stops at the profits of business and they fail to follow the process through to ensure that it benefits the population as a whole.
It is notable that the venerable economists who wrote the letter to Mr. Osbourne uttered not a squeak about the corporate profits which are being filched away overseas to avoid paying tax as was reported in the same edition of the FT. Surely that too is “deeply damaging to the competitiveness of our science and research sectors and the wider economy”.
Poppies