Koran Burners, Cranks & Criminals

A BNP candidate for the Welsh Assembly, Sion Owens, was arrested and charged with a public order offence after police viewed a video of a man apparently burning a copy of the koran. It was alleged that Owens burned the book in his back garden.

When he appeared in court, the Crown Prosecution Service withdrew the charge, but said that investigations into his actions were continuing and that “almost certainly other proceedings will ensue.”

Earlier this month Terry Jones a publicity hungry American stepped out of his usual role of running his own weird church and appointed himself a judge to put the koran on trial. Surprise, surprise he found the book guilty and sentenced it to burning. When news of this event reached Afghanistan some more people with weird religious ideas whipped up a riot in which several people were murdered.

Last year, after Jones had first announced his plans to burn korans and backed off from it, the repulsive Westboro Baptist Church decided this was too good publicity to miss so they put an American flag with a koran and burned both.

So who are the criminals, who are not and what should everybody else do?

Whackos like Westboro and Terry Jones should be endured and largely ignored as part of the price of freedom. Publicity seeking people with crazy ideas are only a problem when sensationalist and circulation hungry media want to use them for their own ends. It would obviously be better if we had more responsible information providers, but we don’t and that too is is a necessary part of free expression.

The sadistic butchers who use koran burning, or any other supposed affront, as an excuse for killing people and imposing their deranged dominance over others are criminals. These people are a genuine danger to society and they need to be brought to justice for their crimes.

In contrast to the freedom guaranteed to American cranks by the US constitution, in the UK our equivalent loon, Sion Owens, gets charged with a public order offence for something he is supposed to have done in his own back garden. When that absurdity collapses the CPS bureaucrats do a tactical withdrawal with a warning that they will go away and think up another crime that they can nail him with.

Owens is probably just as much an inadequate as many other people who swallow the nasty and ridiculous policies of the BNP, but that doesn’t make him a criminal. The right response to Owens and his like is to not vote for them and leave them to the obscurity they have earned.

Our judicial system needs to grow up and allow citizens the ability to make their own adult decisions.

AV. What’s The Alternative?

There will be a referendum on Thursday 5^th May 2011 in which the following question will be put:

 

“At present, the UK uses the ‘first past the post’ system to elect MPs to the House of Commons. Should the ‘alternative vote’ system be used instead?”

 

If AV is introduced the only difference for voters will be that they will be able to list their preference for candidates in numerical order instead of putting an ‘X’ against the name of one candidate. There is no requirement to choose between all of them. If you only want to select one candidate you just put ’1′ for that person instead of ‘X’. You can also stop at any stage. For example if there are six candidates and you only want to rank three of them, you can do that.

 

The ‘no’ campaigners who have claimed that AV is too complicated are either insulting the electorate or demonstrating their own serious inadequacies.

 

The difference that AV would make is that MPs would usually have the support of more than half the people who have voted in their constituency. With ‘first past the post’ (FPTP) it is more often the case that more votes have been cast against the winner than in their favour.

 

This is not very much progress and AV could not be considered to be an ideal way of choosing our politicians, but electoral reform has been very rare in England and we should not let this opportunity pass, despite its shortcomings.

 

What is more important about AV than the MP having at least some support from the majority of voters is that it will make it more possible for small parties and independents to be able to get their viewpoints considered by voters. With FPTP every vote for a minority candidate is not only wasted, there is the fear that by dividing the vote a candidate that you strongly disapprove might get in. This leads electors to put their ‘X’ against the lesser evil rather than voting for the person they really want. With AV there is genuine choice in which number 1 can go to the best candidate and 2 to the lesser evil while reserving last number for the most disapproved candidate. There is no longer the problem of dividing the vote.

 

A large part of the battle for Parties like ours, which are unknown by many electors, is break the barrier into credibility. We have strong and coherent arguments that would be attractive to many voters if they were aware of them, but they will not take any notice of those policies so long as they think that voting Libertarian would be pointless.

 

The only choice you will have in the referendum is to put an ‘X’ in the yes or no box. That is a pretty poor choice. We should be given an opportunity for a properly proportional electoral system that applies to local as well as national government. England is entitled to as much democracy as has already been given to citizens of Scotland, Wales and northern Ireland for their parliament and assemblies, but that is not on offer. In the circumstances, Libertarians should vote yes.

 

It is not that democratic systems are the be all and end all. They are not. What we want to do is to reduce the abuses of wasteful, incompetent and intrusive governments. We cannot achieve that without getting a tighter grip on power seeking politicians.

 

www.lpuk.org

 

No Council Tax Increase

 This week it has been reported that many London boroughs will freeze Council Tax and some will probably reduce it. The leader of Wirral Council has said that he wants a 5.2% increase in April and then around 4% every year for the next four years.

Steve Foulkes and his colleagues have got to wake up. Thousands of people have lost their jobs, public sector workers pay is being frozen and inflation is so low that there will be no increase in pensions in April. No increase in Council Tax is tolerable or acceptable.

Politicians, bankers and others have responsibility for the bankrupt state of our economy, but the guilty ones are not Council Tax payers and certainly not pensioners or low earners with frozen incomes. Instead of punishing the most vulnerable the Council must put an end to its own waste and excess.

Voters should be saying to all our elected representatives that they will not get a vote next May unless they can show that they have worked to keep taxes down and not supported any tax rise.

Vote

Sixteen year olds should be able to vote in elections

We have made long, slow progress towards universal franchise. At each stage there has been resistance. It was said that those who did not own land did not have the responsibility to be able to vote sensibly in elections. Then it was women who could not be trusted to take part in the democratic process. The last stage was that sufficient maturity to cast a vote was conisdered to be eighteen rather than twenty one.

Well, sixteen year olds are considered mature enough to no longer be forced to attend school. They can legally have sex, buy cigarettes and go off to work to pay taxes. As far as I am concerned, that is enough responsibility and assumption of maturity for it to be accompanied by an entitlement to vote for the people who are making these rules. I don’t think this should be a rigid limit for all time. As we have seen, the franchise has been continually extended as democracy has itself matured. We have different layers of government and it seems reasonable that young people should be introduced to the democratic process by having entitlement to vote for town or parish councils at fourteen years of age, for example, and for district and county council elections at fifteen.

 A few countries have extended the franchise to sixteen year olds. It is time for the UK to follow.

Electoral Reform – Proportional Representation

Government should be elected by proportional representation

The nature of government is that it has coercive power. Ultimately the only thing that distinguishes a government from a private security organisation, or even a gang of armed robbers, is that it has legitimacy. Governments claim legitimacy from a whole range of different sources. Historically they tended to say that they had been appointed by God or that they had the approval of God. This is the divine right of kings and all its similar forms throughout the world. Alternatively the government may accept that it achieved power by force of arms, but that battle is a legitimate way to government. Not surprisingly, I do not accept such justifications. Most people would accept that a government must have some degree of approval from the citizens that it governs.. This approval is expressed in a host of different ways including democratic elections by secret ballot which I believe to be the appropriate form of representative government at this stage in the twenty first century.

Changing the system of democratic election will result in different outcomes in terms of the nature of the political parties and composition of government. With the first past the post (FTP) system in the UK, we have a small number of parties with a prospect of gaining members of parliament and usually a government of one party that represents fewer than half of the people who cast their votes in a general election. The main parties are very broad coalitions rather than being expressions of a specific ideology.

Where very proportional systems of election exist, there are usually many more political parties representing the different nuances of political opinion and there is a much greater likelihood that the government will be composed of a coalition of two or more of the parties. For a government to be able to genuinely claim legitimacy, it is my view that each representative in a parliament should be there by virtue of a majority of those voting and the government should be representative of more than fifty percent of the votes cast overall. Neither of these conditions appliies in our system so I do not accept that we have an adeguate democracy to give our government legitimacy. That means that I want to see constitutional change, but we should only be pursuing it by democratic and peaceful means.