The Labour Humanist

"Pushy homos and uppity females getting you down?"

"Pushy homos and uppity females getting you down? Why not cloak your hate in faith and say: It's my religion!" At the Labour Humanist we like to promote some of the independent political cartoonists out there. So please do check out Mikhaela Reid. And here's a great example of her work:

Is it me, or is the War on Christmas getting earlier every year?

Is it me, or does the (phoney) War on Christmas start earlier and earlier with each year that passes? Local supermarkets are already stocking the shelves with Christmas items, but how long before the attacks on the great British Christmas begins? How long before archbishops and the popular press start rolling out the myths of PC kill joys banning Christmas in favour of something called Winterval or Luminos?

The "story" rolled out on an annual basis is that mysterious "politically correct" officials will advance an anti-Christian agenda by "banning" all kinds of Christmas activities. In tabloid short hand this becomes the "war on christmas". It's all very surreal, for a start most Brits, regardless of their beliefs, love their Christmas. I love Christmas, as do most of atheist friends and family. Christmas, alongside the New Year celebrations, make a fantastic end of year come mid-winter jamboree, a chance to celebrate with work colleagues, a chance to put some thought into buying presents for those you care about, and most certainly, yes a chance to indulge in some nice food, fine wines and hard spirits.  But, this isn't the Christmas that the likes of the Daily Mail wish to defend, in fact, they don't like our Christmas, and pine (sic) instead for a enforcement of a purely religious festival.

Last year the phoney War On Christmas started in early November, but there was early skirmishing in September when Steve Doughty on the Daily Mail enthusastically reported comments by the Archbishop of York that Muslims should integrate more and no-one should consider Christmas cards to any way embarass our Muslim friends and neighbours. The War got into full swing on November 7 when the Royal Mail were attacked over the outrageous crime of producing festive stamps that featured Santa Claus and snowmen. Four days later the Archbishop of York (again) attacked the rights of businesses and individuals to send secular or non-Christian Christmas cards. By December the Daily Mail was complaining that only 1 in 100 Christmas cards in shops depicted religious themes, never mind that the British public seemingly prefer secular themes.

In 2005 the campaign was launched by, yes you guessed it, the Daily Mail on November 2 with claims that Lambeth council had renamed its Christmas lights in order to avoid causing "offence".

For any tabloid hack writing a War on Christmas story it is apparently compulsory to include references to a PC campaign to re-name Christmas..."Winterval". The evil geniuses behind this campaign are said to be Birmingham City Council. This is because winterval came to prominence in 1998 when Birmingham City Council used it as a title to encompass the three month collection of multi-faith and secular events, running from October to January, and including Diwali, Bonfire Night, New Year and other seasonal events as well as Christmas itself. Winterval ran for 2 years - 1997 to 1998 and was intended as a way to drive business into Birmingham's newly rejuvenated town centre.

But what's facts got to with it. Oliver Burkeman on the Guardian set out to investigate the facts behind the War on Christmas stories, and found them to be a load of old baubles:

."..a few awkward facts. Luton does not have a festival called Luminos. It does not use any alternative name for Christmas. When it did, once, five years ago, hold something called Luminos one weekend in late November, the event didn't even replace the council's own Christmas celebrations, let alone forbid anyone else from doing anything. Similarly, Christmas is not called Winterval in Birmingham. The Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Sick Children never banned a Christmas CD for mentioning Jesus. And Chester council's "un-Christian" Christmas card says - as cards have done for decades - "Season's Greetings".

"We're not going to have a war, we're going to have the appearance of a war," says the cynical spin doctor in David Mamet's screenplay for the 1997 movie Wag The Dog, about an imaginary conflict created to whip up support for an ailing president. But he might equally have been talking about the 2006 war on Christmas - a war that tells us much about the growing politicisation and sense of entitlement among religious groups in Britain, but which turns out to have been almost entirely invented."

So, when's it going to start? There can be no question of if or maybe, we know for sure that bishops and archbishops will make alliance with journalists to play fast and loose with the facts and launch another phoney War on Christmas. The ironic thing about all this is that there really appears to be absolutely no war on traditional Christian activities, but there is a crusade against the secular Christmas much enjoyed and valued by most Brits. 

Let's keep our collective ears to the ground and see who fires the first shots in this year's annual pantomime of nonsense. Perhaps we should develop an idiot award for bloggers, bishops and hacks who trot out the winterval myths...perhaps an award for being a winterval wally, the Wallies for short?

 

How secularism boosts social democracy

Secular humanist culture can encompass religious lives, but religious culture cannot do the same for secularism and atheism. Some powerful arguments from Mitchell Cohen in Dissent Magazine on the important role secular humanism should play in creating vibrant social democracies. Here's a short excerpt but it really is recommended reading:

"When religious movements are triumphalist, when they believe that they can assert themselves inexorably in the public realm, liberal and social democratic values are jeopardized....

...In my view, a secular state needs a humanist basis. Yes, that means that I think secular humanist culture should be privileged in liberal democracy (or in what I would prefer, social democracy) but not religion. The reason is that it can encompass religious lives, whereas religious culture cannot do the same for secularism and atheism. Humanism, with its Renaissance origins (among thinkers who were mostly religious in some way), fostered pluralism by legitimizing multiple authorities, leading people to evaluate for themselves, to see varied points of view, not just to accept a last word from one authority...

...It seems to me that aggressive efforts at some form of religious domination of the public realm in the U.S. and elsewhere undermine the possibilities of common political language. Let me make this stronger. If I express my secular humanist ideas publicly, if I try to persuade fellow citizens of them, I must be open to criticism—fierce criticism, down to the basics, up to the dots on the i’s of my ideas, every word and sentiment. I can survive those criticisms. I may even change my ideas. After all, the different bases of my ideas may be wrong, in whole or part. But what happens when religious-political claims are open to the same challenge? If a Muslim friend, on the basis of his profound religious convictions, makes an argument for a law that is to govern me, shall I challenge his belief in Muhammad’s prophetic role? Anyone who knows some history knows it is likely to lead to religious wars. The alternative is to ask him (or her) to secularise the principles of argument. ..."

Confused Conservative Party web site attacks its own non-domiciles policy as a "City of London" tax

The Conservatives yesterday promised to impose a £25,000-per-year charge for "non-domicile" taxpayers, but their web site still has a briefing attacking, what is now, their own policy from when the Liberal Democrats proposed a similar scheme a few years ago.

The document is titled the "Lib Dem tax sting" and they brand taxes on non-domiciles as a "City of London Tax". Here is the apparent rebuttal of their own policies:

"#7 - City of London tax

Liberal Democrats would ‘end the practice of giving non-domicile tax status’ (Liberal Democrats, Alternative Budget, Invest to Innovate, 8 March 2002, p.6).

Yet as the Evening Standard has warned, ‘a change in the tax status of non-domiciled resident individuals will devastate the London shipping business centred on the Baltic Exchange, cost thousands of City jobs, destroy London’s position as the international centre for shipping, undermine its ability to attract key foreign personnel in all its other areas of activity and result in a lower, not a higher, tax take for the Exchequer… When people talk about the competitiveness of the City, they usually refer to the number of foreign bankers and brokers who are happy to come here to work. These create the pool of talent that cements London's position as the leading international financial centre. A change in the rules will make them want to leave London. There is nothing the Government could do that would give a bigger boost to Paris, Frankfurt and Zurich, the rival Continental financial centres’ (Evening Standard, 26 March 2002).

A study by economists at Numerica has observed that abolishing non-domicile tax status would knock between £5 billion and £10 billion off Britain’s GDP (cited in Sunday Telegraph, 3 August
2003)."

David Cameron may have given up smoking, but this is all policy written on the back of a fag packet stuff. The Tories are clearly struggling to get themselves ready for a possible election.

The sad demise of the secular Tory bloggers

As we enter Conservative conference week it's sad to see the apparent demise of the small strand of Tory bloggers who adopted a consciously secular and humanist tone to their writing.

We have lost Martine Martin's blog as she has decided to stop blogging now she has a job in Westminster. This prompted to me to look up the other secular Tory blogger on my links list, Jeff Peel, only to find his wordpress blog "the way it is" seems to have bitten the dust.

This is all very sad because we need a healthy secular voice inside the Conservative Party, who in my experience, and from their recent history, are incredibly intolerant of a multi-belief society and many Tory activists seem rather keen on using the power of the state to force a cultural and political primacy of Christianity down our necks, whether we like it or not. It was the Conservatives who implemented compulsory Christian worship in schools and cross-party Humanist groups in parliament find it hard to recruit and retain Conservative members.

Are there any secular humanist Tory bloggers out there? By this I don't mean Conservative supporting bloggers who pre-dominantly write about the interaction between religion and politics from a secular standpoint, although that would be an intriguing find. But any Tory bloggers who have "outed" themselves as atheists and who occasionally cross swords with the religious authoritarians in their own party. Is there any secular life out there in the Tory blogosphere?