Chibbing the Caliphate

Watching recent events develop in Paris (a city I love) has been painful, but it seems to me that the legacy of these unspeakable tragedies is an increased awareness of the real extent and scope of the problem of religious extremism. It takes something like last Friday’s massacres in a European capital to drum this home. We western Europeans habitually look upon the pointless turf-wars and ethnic slaughter of the Middle East with a detached interest. We should now be more fully aware that the problems of that area are here with us too.

Monitoring the social media for reaction as I do, I see a lot of confusion in the West about what can be done to address these problems. Some demand a negotiated peace in Syria, surely a most remote prospect for now, Others advocate increased military intervention against ISIS, which seems more likely to happen than not; indeed France and Russia are both stepping up their bombing campaigns. Still others wish for increased security measures in Europe, including some that will mean the sacrifice of long-cherished freedoms.

These things can all be debated, and some may even do some good, but to my mind it looks likely that there will be more attacks such as Friday’s, and we have just to accept that ugly truth. It is important to stay resolute against the twisted moralities of pathological extremism; these people must never win. We must not live in fear, but carry on our lives normally. Caution and vigilance are both sensible measures, of course, but we must not live in perpetual fear.

The nutbag extremists may even target my own dearly beloved Scotland at some point, for all I know. Judging by what I have seen emerge as one disappointingly common reaction here, they would succeed only in further degrading the reputation of their faith as well as endangering its Scottish adherents. Already Police Scotland say they are aware of several physical and verbal attacks upon Muslims, and several arrests have been made. I find it shameful that innocent people can be targeted like this in a nation which is historically proud of its ethnic and religious tolerance, but we have plenty of idiots of our own.

The overthrow of the Caliphate isn’t achieved by chibbing Scottish muslims, gadgies. If it’s just a fight you’re after, join the army. Or join ISIS, even. They are just as mental, but use automatic weapons, no chibs. Leave our immigrant community alone, they are not our shame; you are.

 

chib (tʃɪb ) (Scottish) (slang)
Definitions
verb
Word forms: chibs, chibbing or , chibbed
(transitive) to stab or slash with a sharp weapon

noun
a sharp weapon, such as a knife or razor

If we turn these people away

The current European ‘problem’ of the mass immigration of people from countries beset by war and poverty has dominated the mainstream media of late. The truth is that this has been going on for many years now, albeit on a more slender and certainly less publicised scale.

There is talk of a European crisis, now that the numbers concerned have tipped the scales and awakened us all to dilemma until now largely unexamined. The western democracies have achieved a moral and economic superiority in the world that attracts those of us who have not benefited from such and who are desperately seeking our help. Mere compassion, if not a sense of responsibility, should be enough to force us to consider our options in trying to deal with the current issues.

If we reject these people through our own self-interest, how valid will our claim then become to be the moral arbiters we sometimes claim to be? It is easy to pretend that the problems are insurmountable, that we cannot deal with such an influx of people, no matter how desperate. Is that really true? Of course not. These are the very people who have left their homeland in the hope that all we said was true, that here we treat every human being as a person with rights and with a place in the world, deserving of freedom and safety. If we let these people down we gift those still in their home countries to the mindlessly faithful and the theocratic fascists that we must in the end defeat if the world is not to fall into a new Dark Age.

The crisis is really one of Europe’s own. Is the EU really capable of responding as it should, according to its founding principles? Or is Europe really a convenient amalgam of essentially self-interested nation states?

How long must the alarm bell ring?

How long must the alarm bell ring before decent people wake up? There were signs this week that both the government and the ordinary folk of these islands may at last be ready to arise to a most uncomfortable new day. The last time we slept so late in such circumstances we found Nazi Germany had joined us for breakfast.

Last year we read, or more probably watched, the news that another Islamic Jihadist group had emerged and had made territorial gains in Syria and Iraq, taking advantage of the post-Saddam chaos and Assad’s desperate civil war to form what they called a caliphate across the borders of the two states. Deprived of reliable information of sufficient depth to appreciate the import of this development, most of us regarded it as yet another sign of the general madness that seems to be the permanent state of affairs in that far-off region. Reading up on the reaction in Britain to the Nazi incorporations of Austria, the Sudetenland and then Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s it is at least clear that government became increasingly concerned, if not the wider public.

Yet until very recent events, there has been really very little sign that government has really appreciated the threat posed by Isil, or Daesh as they are more frequently known in the Arab world. Initially they might have been seen as a benign influence, or at least potential allies in getting rid of Syria’s ugly tyrant Assad; do you remember how close the west came to intervention there? Even when Iraq’s second city Mosul suddenly fell to them we heard little from Westminster, or anywhere else in mainstream British life, about this group or what they stood for. The US State Department at least said that it was “deeply concerned” and that the situation was “extremely serious”. Reading through the British press of that date (it is only a twelve months ago) the main concern seemed to be the Iraqi armed forces and the reasons for its failure to defend Iraqi territory against a rag-bag militia of Sunni extremists. The question of most concern to our press seemed to be how long it would take to chase the insurgents back to Syria.

A year later, no progress at all has been made in that direction; indeed, Isil have made further territorial gains in both countries. It has been left to the Kurds, the national group on the borders of four middle eastern nations but who lack the recognition from any of them of their right to nationhood, to fight back and halt Isil’s progress eastward and northward from Mosul. The USA of course has been bombing the extremists from on high to try and assist the Kurds, but it was always made clear that there would be “no boots on the ground” and equally clear therefore that the impact of their intervention would be very limited. Isil’s leaders and commanders are not stupid, and have developed tactics that render air power limited in effect.

As time passed we learned that this group were a strange combination of seventh-century barbarism, expert propaganda and twenty-first century technology. Using the western-developed internet and social media Isil publicised their horrific triumphs ; the beheadings of hapless western interlopers, the mass killings of fellow Muslims of the wrong sect, the wanton destruction of the archaeological treasures of those areas under their control. Yet until this week most British people could watch all of this develop with distaste and reprobation, with the sort of tutting and shrugging that often presages the words “Well, what are you going to do, with people like that?” The threat, for most of us, seemed to be directed elsewhere.

This week that all changed. The horrible murders of some thirty British tourists on the beaches of Tunisia has created a more immediate appraisal of the situation. The Prime Minister gave us the news at last that Isil provides “an existential threat” to the United Kingdom. He might have gone further, for it is becoming clear that Isil enshrines a world view so at odds with the values of western civilisation that one or the other must collapse. Cameron’s description of “the struggle of our generation” is no exaggeration.

The west, founded on secular Enlightenment values and the consent of the governed, has nothing at all in common with a culture that begins and ends with the establishment worldwide of a brutal, ignorant, anti-democratic, ultra-extreme theocracy, ignorant of and opposed to all that has been achieved so painfully through the course of the last thousand years. A quick internet search will provide plenty of evidence of the nature of the threat, for the Jihadists themselves have been careful to provide us with much of it. Many of us have come across some, perhaps the heavily edited footage screened on our TV sets, and we know it isn’t nice.

Be very sure, it isn’t at all nice. The establishment of a permanent, unalterable theocracy enshrining the strict application of Sharia law, including beheadings, mutilations and stonings, most of them for offences that would not be illegal in any western country (four people were executed in Syria this week for the practice of black magic), the bulldozing of magnificent ancient buildings, temples and archaeological sites (this week we learned that Isil has placed explosive charges in the ruins of Palmyra), is entirely inimical to the values the west holds dear. Look elsewhere for mercy, empathy, human solidarity, natural justice, freedom of worship, freedom of expression, the appreciation of art and music. If the Jihadists have their way all of these things will be lost to us, and they have us in their sights. They are growing in power, strength and confidence, and it will not be long before they are much more difficult to overcome than they are at present.

What can be done? The British government seems to be more intent upon limiting the threat at home than any wider theatre, perhaps limited by the size of the armed forces they can still command. The USA still dithers, knowing how resistant their public is to the idea of more US soldiers dying ‘over there’.The EU leaders seem preoccupied by financial problems, only Italy and Greece really suffering from the knock-on effects of the middle-eastern maelstrom in the form of illegal immigration on a mass scale. The UN will no doubt put together a resolution condemning Isil’s actions eventually, and no doubt too some proposal or other for a multi-national military intervention will be aired and promptly vetoed by the usual suspects. Nothing will be done quickly, in other words, beyond the supply of money and arms to those in the region with the will to fight.

Meanwhile, Isil continue to recruit the young and disaffected among Muslims across the globe, and continue to make gains across the Arab world and beyond. This week we discover that Isil has announced its intention to supplant Hamas in Gaza and “uproot” the state of Israel. Although Israel has never admitted to the possession of nuclear weapons, they do have them. If they are not able to use them against the threat, they will fall into Isil’s hands. Isil has also gained a considerable following in most other Arab nations, especially Libya, where large tracts of territory are under their control. The latest development is that the Isil’s reach has extended to Russia, with a governate declared in the country’s North Caucasus region this week. It remains to be seen what Russia may do about that. Be very sure, the threat to our civilisation is real, and it is growing. At the moment, there is little prospect of meaningful, unified intervention on the part of world leaders.

If they cannot or will not act, what can ordinary people do? We can overcome or diffidence and our fear, for a start. We must tell our leaders what our concerns are, and in our day-to-day lives vocalise them too. We have the high moral ground. Our achievements are great, and God is not, as the late Christopher Hitchens memorably pointed out. Western civilisation, the Enlightenment, democracy and scientific knowledge did not appear through the work of the proponents of blind faith and superstition but despite their opposition to these things, and we must not fall into such hands ever again.

Why I am not going to punch the Pope

The days following the outrageous and deeply evil attack on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris saw the news channels, the social media and indeed the streets of Paris all speaking as one, expressing shock, grief and outrage at this horrific event. Western opinion was overwhelmingly of this stamp, and those of our friends in France placed particular emphasis on the central place of free speech in the constitution of their nation and their determination that no amount of murder and terror on their soil would ever change this. Watching the massive demonstrations of support for France’s secular constitution, it was impossible not to be impressed by this monumental expression of human solidarity, and in my case to say the word “bravo!” out loud.

How odd it was then, reading the news headlines the other day, to discover that the head of the Roman Catholic Church had seen fit to offer his opinion on the issue of free speech, and to find that he had weighed in against it. “Free speech must have its limits” he was quoted as saying. If it has limits, I found myself observing at once, then it is not free speech. Pope Francis had struck me prior to this as a rather liberal and moderate man, intent upon a certain amount of Vatican reform and seemingly well aware of the issues facing humanity in a fast-changing epoch. Yet this staggering statement, together with corollary remarks which included a threat that anyone speaking disrespectfully of his mother would find that “a punch awaits him”, reminds us that at heart this particular branch of theism has more in common with the Jihadi movement than is perhaps generally perceived. What he is really hinting at here is that Charlie Hebdo had it coming. “You cannot insult the faith of others” he added, without giving his authority for such a view. He is in point of law quite wrong in France’s case, and even if he were not, is violence the natural response to any perceived insult to religion (or indeed family honour)?

That’s the way to do it!

For the Pope, it would appear, free speech ends at the door of religion. Just as it does in much of the Islamic world, which constutionally speaking is a ragbag jumble of criminal dictatorships, tyrranical kingdoms, rogue states and repressive theocracies. This is where the denial of free speech leads, Snr Bergoglio. The values of the Enlightenment are under powerful physical, bloody attack now from religious intolerants and extremists, and you have taken sides with them on this issue. I am offended, deeply offended. However, it would never do to punch you in the mouth by way of a response, for I believe in free speech, and when my beliefs are challenged I defend them without recourse to violence, by using reason to explain them. Of course, that is not a recourse that is open to the soldiers of Jihad, or indeed to His Holiness.

He Turns If He Wants To

The report this week from the Glasgow Herald, alluding to the apparent Labour Party u-turn on the full devolution of tax-raising powers to the Scottish parliament, has people wondering what is going on in Scottish Labour.¹ They lack a leader at the moment, yet ‘handbrake turns’ in policy are apparently possible, without reference to the party membership, or indeed anyone else. Someone is making important and controversial executive decisions, that is clear enough.

Scottish Labour have suffered some crushing reverses since joining the Tories and Liberal Democrats in the Better Together campaign during the Scottish referendum. BT won the vote, but the fall-out for Labour has been as dire as it was predictable. The opinion polls have their predicted share of the Scottish vote collapsing to the point where they may return only a handful of MPs in May next year. A recent Ipsos Mori poll predicts they might be left with only 4 MPs representing constituencies north of the border.² In the meantime support for the SNP is skyrocketing.³

It shouldn’t surprise anyone then that Labour perceive an urgent need to try and reverse this monumental swing. The question is, who is making these decisions on the party’s behalf? Without a current leader, it’s clear enough that some unelected person is working behind the scenes. Who could it be?

Spud-u-like?

In a somewhat related development, Labour’s Jim Murphy MP (currently bidding to lead Scottish Labour) came out this week with a strikingly Damascene conversion to support for full tax-raising powers for Scotland. Murphy is not the Scottish party leader, of course, but you would never guess so were you to judge by the number of appearances he has made on terrestrial TV this week. I am told by friends who still watch BBC political programmes that his face is “never off” that channel. One more reason for me not to continue my private boycott.

Murphy has form when it comes to disregarding democratic principles. In 1995, as President of the NUS, he dropped its opposition to the scrapping of the student grant, despite the NUS conference voting otherwise. This resulted in his condemnation for “intolerant and dictatorial behaviour” in a Commons early day motion raised by Ken Livingstone and signed by 17 other Labour MPs. He got his reward from the party leadership shortly after, being offered a position as the Special Projects Manager of the Scottish Labour Party.

In an instance of opportunism of a slightly different sort, Jim Murphy was at the centre of an expenses row in 2012 when it emerged he was among 27 MPs who were letting out London homes at the same time as claiming public money to rent in the city. Although the practice did not break rules, it has been characterised as a “loophole” that allows politicians to profit from Commons allowances. Murphy had previously apologised “on behalf of all politicians” for the expenses scandal in 2009.

Contrary to all of the above however, it may just be that Mr Murphy does retain some core political values, at least in imperialistic terms. He is a member of the Henry Jackson Society, a neo-conservative think-tank founded to advance “the maintenance of a strong military, by the United States, the countries of the European Union and other democratic powers, armed with expeditionary capabilities with a global reach”.⁴

One cannot help but wonder whether such a candidate for the Scottish Labour leadership will reflect the sort of traditional Labour values so obviously required if that party are to beat off the appeal of the SNP’s centre-left programme. Perhaps he will win the leadership contest; but then again, perhaps he doesn’t feel he needs to.

Links

1. http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/columnists/unelected-person-making-policy-in-the-peoples-party.25960299

2. http://news.stv.tv/scotland-decides/297729-stv-poll-labour-would-annihilated-if-general-election-held-tomorrow/

3. http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/politics/9376072/meet-the-new-queen-of-scotland-nicola-sturgeons-unstoppable-rise/

4. http://web.archive.org/web/20060430054251/http://zope06.v.servelocity.net/hjs/principles_html

My New Favourite City

I could never claim to be well-travelled, but I do enjoy getting out of Scotland when the opportunity appears and last week I returned from a ten day visit to Budapest. For various reasons, I had long wished to visit Hungary. Most of all, I discovered the 20th century Hungarian composer Bela Bartok whilst in my early twenties and have loved his music ever since. My interest in his work expanded to an interest in Hungarian culture, and it became clear to me that this was a unique and fascinating country.

Hungarians speak a language that is quite unrelated to most Indo-European tongues, by dint of their post-Roman migration to central Europe from central Asia. Hungary’s key strategic position has brought its people a long list of successive waves of invaders and occupiers – Mongols, Christian emperors, Ottoman Turks, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union – but the distinctiveness of their culture has lent Hungarians an independence of spirit which has always re-emerged whole from the country’s troubled history.

Hungarian parliament building on the banks of the Danube.

Budapest is a city of some two million people, by far the largest in the country, and visually is an effective mirror into Hungary’s past. Many of the older buildings were either damaged or destroyed during the Second World War, but restoration work has been continuous since and today there is enough distinctively Hungarian architecture, ancient and modern, to reflect the Hungarian outlook. The late nineteenth century Gothic revival took a distinctive form, perhaps at its best in the parliament building on the banks of the Danube, but surviving too in some of the buildings in the commercial districts. Older buildings such as Matyas church on Buda show an earlier fascination with the Gothic style that has influenced the country’s aesthetic taste ever since.

Gothic revivalism, Hungarian style.

Architecture aside, there is plenty to engage the interest in Budapest; museums and galleries galore, restaurants by the hundred, a vibrant nightlife in the more ‘Bohemian’ areas, extensive parks, and much else. I found the award-winning House of Terror (Terror Háza Múzeum) a particularly affecting experience, located in the actual building where torture and executions were carried out by the secret police during the Soviet era.

Soviet tank on display at the House of Terror.

Much more uplifting is Hungarian food and drink, as excellent in quality as it is inexpensive; two of us could expect to pay about 8,000 forints (£20 or €25) for a three course dinner with wine, but we often paid quite a lot less. I was particularly delighted with the city’s main nightlife peculiarity, the ruin pubs, dilapidated buildings on the Pest side of the river that have been converted into trendy and idiosyncratic bars.

Szimpla Kert, one of Budapest’s ruin pubs.

In a short blog post there is little chance of giving a real flavour of a city of this size, and my intention has merely been to arouse the reader’s interest. I can heartily recommend Budapest to anyone with an interest in European culture, customs and art, as it is so different to that found in most other capitals. As for Bartok, I was lucky enough to visit the house where the great man lived and worked during the 1930s, now a public museum and a testament to his music, and as distinctively Hungarian as the rest of this magical city.

The Day that Auntie died

I always knew the Scottish referendum would become a heated affair. I knew that the mass media and social networks would be full of passionate debate. I suspected, but hoped I was wrong, that the privately owned newspapers and channels might show bias in their coverage of issues and events. What I never dreamed in my worst nightmare however is that in the course of this campaign the BBC, the longest-established national broadcasting service and respected throughout the world as a reliable, impartial and trustworthy presenter of news, would blatantly cast aside its public broadcasting ethos and become so clearly biased against the Yes Campaign in its political coverage.

For those who do not know, I should point out that the BBC is a public-owned media service mainly funded by TV licences (mandatory for all owners of television equipment in the UK) and does not make money from advertising. The BBC is bound by a code of conduct which is generally known as the public service broadcasting ethos. This requires that all coverage of current affairs is presented in a balanced, fair and impartial manner. Now that, in my submission, is a very difficult thing to do, and I have some sympathy with those who claim that over the many decades of its existence it has generally made a reasonable fist of it. Yes there have been complaints of BBC bias from time to time over the years. Some were investigated, and occasionally the complaints upheld and the appropriate people rapped on the knuckles. Strangely enough, right-wing liberal politicians have complained of a left-wing bias at the BBC, beginning with Norman Tebbit in 1982 and continuing through the intervening years, though impartial consumers may have found little evidence of this. However, it has become very clear now that recent changes at ‘Auntie Beeb’ have seriously twisted the corporation’s public broadcasting ethos in precisely the other direction.

In March of this year columnist Owen Jones wrote in the Guardian: “The truth is the BBC is stacked full of rightwingers. The chairman of the BBC Trust is Chris Patten, a former Conservative cabinet minister. The BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, was once chairman of the Young Conservatives. His former senior political producer, Thea Rogers, became George Osborne’s special advisor in 2012. Andrew Neil, the presenter of the BBC’s flagship political programmes Daily Politics and This Week, is chairman of the conservative Spectator magazine. His editor is Robbie Gibb, former chief of staff to the Tory Francis Maude. After the BBC’s economics editor Stephanie Flanders left for a £400,000-a-year job at that notorious leftwing hotbed, JP Morgan, she was replaced by its business editor Robert Peston. His position was taken by Kamal Ahmed from the rightwing Sunday Telegraph, a journalist damned by the Guardian’s  Nick Davies for spinning government propaganda in the run-up to the Iraq war.” *

Now Jones is a left-winger, but I remember reading this article at the time and feeling there were certainly some worrying signs. Yet it was only this week that the full extent of the problem became clear. In my fifty years of watching BBC news coverage I have seen absolutely nothing like the total abandonment of impartiality that we have seen in the last few weeks concerning the referendum campaign. Since they have covered it so well, I point the reader to some of the recent incidences of anti-Yes bias provided by Newsnet Scotland:

http://www.newsnetscotland.com/index.php/affairs-scotland/9719-the-dirty-dozen-the-case-against-bbc-scotland

Only today, after the above article was written, did the extent of the problem become crystal clear. BBC chief political correspondent Nick Robinson, quite out of control of his emotions, launched a vitriolic heckling attack upon First Minister Alex Salmond in front of the world’s TV cameras. Salmond remained calm and unflustered and answered his questions with good grace, not once but twice.

Later the BBC heavily edited the video for broadcast, cutting out Robinson’s disgraceful episode and claimed that Salmond had not answered the questions. It took my breath away, and I realised at last that Auntie was dead. It is time to move on and leave the corruption of the British establishment behind. Scotland will hopefully press the reset button on their political and social life by voting Yes for independence next week.

 

*It’s the BBC’s rightwing bias that is the threat to democracy and journalism, The Guardian, March 17, 2014

These Troubled Islands: a guide for the perplexed

It was only when I left these shores on visits abroad, and especially when I moved to live and work in the USA, that I realised what a complex political phenomenon the United Kingdom really is. Time after time I had to try to correct mistaken impressions upon what the UK actually is or is not, and in doing so I finally came to understand why there was so much confusion on the issue abroad. It is a truly complex affair. Recent comments from abroad have reminded me of this problem, and this short article will attempt to explain.

Firstly, the UK is not a country. It is a sovereign state created by the political union of several countries. It is also a kingdom, with an hereditary monarch as head of state. England is by far the largest of the four partners in the union, with a current population eleven times the size of the second-largest, Scotland. It is therefore a mistake (if an understandable one) to refer to the UK as ‘England’, particularly so perhaps when speaking to a native of one of the other partners. The term ‘Great Britain’ is sometimes used to refer to the UK, but this is also inaccurate as it is properly the name of the largest island of the archipelago and therefore does not include Northern Ireland, one of the four partners in the union.

The union has had a troubled history. I shall skip the centuries of bloody warfare and stick to the outcomes. The Principality of Wales was ‘incorporated’ into the Kingdom of England (as it was at that time) in 1536, after hundreds of years of de facto Welsh sovereignty. In 1603 the royal families of the kingdoms of Scotland and England became one. by dint of centuries of intermarriage. This Union of Crowns led ultimately to the 1707 Treaty of Union, which abolished the Scottish parliament. Great Britain at that point was governed by one crown and one parliament. In 1801 the Kingdoms of Ireland (hitherto ruled by English monarchs in any case) and Great Britain became The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the Irish parliament was absorbed into Westminster. The last change came after five sixths of Ireland seceded from the union in 1922, leaving only the northernmost counties under UK rule. Therefore the present full name of the UK is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

I hope this article has been of some benefit to someone. As I say, it is a complicated story, and there may be more complications to come very shortly. What many in Scotland are proposing to do in next week’s referendum is secede from the UK just as the majority of Ireland has done. If Scotland makes that choice, it will be interesting to see which name the UK adopts next.

Taking Offence for God

One of the most frequent difficulties I have in life as an outspoken secularist and anti-theist is that my views are apparently capable of “causing offence”. I have strong opinions on other subjects; party politics, the environment, education, scientific research, abortion, nationalism, global capitalism and many others. I often discuss these other subjects with people who hold different opinions, but I do not recall even once being told that my views were offensive to them. When it comes to faith, there is a widespread and extreme touchiness intimately built in to the subject that simply does not apply to anything else.

Of course, this is not to say that heat is not generated in, for example, political discussions. When people disagree over politics however, neither party takes the other’s viewpoint as a personal insult. Marxists, and Libertarians, and Anarchists are used to having their reasoning challenged, and all political causes or movements accept that these challenges must be refuted with a discourse based in reason. Yet when one challenge another’s religious views this is almost invariably taken very personally indeed. Atheists who are brave enough to do this are accused very often of impoliteness, of rudeness, even of arrogance. Any attempt on their part to employ rationality and reason to question religious faith very often meets with a wholly unreasonable and hostile reaction. It seems to me that the religious inhabit a unilaterally declared reason-free zone. 

The reasons for this state of affairs are partly historical. It is only in very recent times, a blink of the eye in human evolutionary terms, that religions have been intellectually challenged. When they were, the outcome was not happy for the challenger. It is even more recently that the rationality of the the eighteenth century Enlightenment began to be applied to religious matters. Quite simply, the religious are not yet used to having their faith subjected to the process of reason. There is no doubt at all, however, that in many cases the offence-taking is a ruse designed to silence questions that might actually require the faithful to defend the indefensible.

There is bad news for those who adopt this tactic of playing the offence card. Reason and free enquiry are not going away. Nor is science, which in the last two hundred years has shown that the ‘truth’ of the religious texts is anything but. Religion has already had to give up much ground since Galileo showed that the Earth is not the centre of the universe. Geology and palaeontology have revealed the true age of the planet, biology has demonstrated that present-day humans evolved and were not created, medicine has established that diseases arise from the invasion of the body by microscopic lifeforms. Science is not done with religion, which was humankind’s first attempt to explain things which were otherwise inexplicable, and hiding from the truth by taking offence or by refusing to think about belief will not stop science from making further inroads upon it.

Orwell’s writing guidelines

George Orwell in his ‘Politics and the English Language’ suggested a set of guidelines for writers that have strongly influenced my own work. He asserted that a scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

What am I trying to say?
What words will express it?
What image or idiom will make it clearer?
Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

I came to love Orwell’s work some forty years ago and read everything of his I could get my youthful, sweaty hands on, but nothing of his had a greater influence upon me than the above four questions. In all my writing I try to bear them in mind, but particularly when the fairly hideous first draft has been set down and the time for rewriting is at hand. These questions are so fundamental to all good writing that I see them almost as a writer’s written constitution; to me these truths are self-evident and require no elaboration or qualification.

However, he then went on to suggest two more questions that the writer should ask himself:

Could I put it more shortly?
Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

I have reservations about both of these points. Brevity is a fine virtue in writing; I could mention several authors who I wish had been terse to the point of failing to write at all. Yet there are also some wonderful expansive works of fiction that I would not lose a word of. I can also think of some very ‘ugly’ pieces of writing that are wonderful to read. In fact the context in which Orwell makes these comments makes it clear that he is referring to political writing, and not to fiction at all, a point that is often missed by contemporary students. The same is true of his six writing ‘rules’:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Orwell was a journalist and a man of his time, and these rules still stand as the political writer’s written constitution. Yet authors might now question one or two of these points. One only need study the last of these to realise that some modern literature has left Orwell behind.

My own relationship with these guidelines is ambiguous. I bear them in mind at all times, but I do not always adopt them. The importance of these principles is that they require the writer to think about what he says and how he says it, not that he slavishly follows them; Orwell was after all the most anti-totalitarian writer anyone could name.

https://vimeo.com/78789288.