What I’d like to see less of in 2012

I had barely nominated David Eastwood for Bright Green Scotland’s Dick of the Year award when, as if I’d summoned a daemon from the west midlands, an article of his appeared in the Guardian education supplement. Don’t underestimate this man; he is the embodiment of all that is wrong with higher education. He bans student protests on campus. He sits on the board of USS pensions, screwing over academics across the nation. He suspends student union officers for protesting against Lib Dems in their free time. He takes a cavalier attitude towards his staff, not only those striking over pensions, but also cleaning staff, paid poverty pay whilst he himself takes £419,000 (page 42 – by my reckoning that’s more than the British Prime Minister and the US President combined) back to his rent-free house which recently had over 200 grand spend on it in a refurb. He sat on the Browne review panel. This really is a man who acts like the CEO of a corporation, who sees higher education as a commodity to be bought and sold, and universities as private businesses, not public instruments for social change.

This article is further evidence of that fact. Bizarrely comparing policy-making to both croquet and sausage-making, Eastwood pines for the days when laws were put together behind closed doors “with university leaders, mandarins and ministers locked in serious, often fierce, but apparently seemly debate”. Notice here he refers to ‘university leaders’. I presume he means people like himself, not students or staff. Clearly he thinks the stakeholders in higher education have no place at the table when discussing policy which directly affects them. We must not only keep policymaking away from the people, but even away from their representatives, according to Eastwood, “legislation would finally pass, on the rare occasion it was necessary, without parliamentary debate boiling over.” Oh heaven forbid we’d have a debate in Parliament!! Obviously etymology isn’t his strong point.

And yet, despite holding a certain disdain for democracy, Eastwood still claims that there is a consensus “that students should contribute more and the taxpayer less to the cost of higher education.” Few could see the mass demonstrations in the streets and honestly call it a consensus. “Make no mistake” he writes, “both political sides committed before the election to legislating Browne”. Laughably, he can’t seem to be able to conceive of anything more progressive than New Labour’s higher education policy, as if the Tories and New Labour represent the two sides of the debate.

“A few, sometimes too few, sought to make workable policy – notably, and laudably, the minister for higher education, David Willetts…” David Willetts will go down in history as the man who destroyed higher education in theUK, and rightly so. Notice that Eastwood implies that the alternative – education provided and funded by the state – is unworkable. Apparently he just can’t understand how to make taxes higher, or to just collect all the tax we’re already owed, and invest the extra revenue in education. How that would work is just beyond his comprehension. Never mind that that’s what happens in most of Europe. Never mind that free education of a sort still remains in Scotland. It’s unworkable, can’t be done.

Apparently fees aren’t even important! It’s ok if they put a price tag on your education, and if you end up repaying your debts for the rest of your life, because none of the fees are up front. “There are no upfront fees,” says Eastwood, “and the repayments are proportionate to income, which is a proxy of sorts for personal benefit.” You know what else is proportionate to income? Income tax. In fact income tax is more progressive than that, because you not only pay a proportion of your income, but you pay a higher proportion of it if you earn more. So the people who benefit most from society end up paying more for society’s higher education. Sounds fair to me.

Don’t let anyone tell you that the fees arrangement is progressive. Student support is incredibly important, as Eastwood argues, and arguably in practical terms substantially increasing student support could have a more positive impact on students’ lives than getting rid of fees. But there is a wider point to be made here. By taking away public funding for higher education in such a dramatic way, Browne and the government are making the ideological point that education is not an instrument for social change, it’s not an institution built and provided by society for its own betterment, universities are not repositories and generators of knowledge and expertise, and they’re not even merely a way to address the needs of the job market and promote growth. By funding education from students’ pockets, the government is setting a precedent for higher education to be provided privately. Education is now not a right but a privilege. It is now not part of the core activity of the state, but instead something that can be done entirely separately from it. We’re even seeing some HE institutions not being subject to public procurement laws because so little of their funding comes from the public purse. The fees aren’t important just because they cost students money and because they put students off attending university. They’re important because they’re replacing public funding, and they represent the commoditisation of education.

According to Eastwood, the people who make these kinds of arguments don’t really care about or understand education. They just want to use policy debates for less noble, transient purposes. “Higher education is truly too important to be left to the ideologues.” Eastwood wants to deregulate fees, he wants to commoditise education, he wants education policy to be formulated behind closed doors without representatives of the stakeholders, he can’t understand how higher taxes would work, and he has the gall to call his opponents ideologues. The man has no shame.

Eastwood can’t even address the very legitimate arguments made against the Browne review. He implies that the majority disagree with it because they jumped to conclusions before it was released, and then dismissively throws together all the different reasons someone might disagree with the recommendations of the report, as if those who “want a wholly publicly funded system”, those who are convinced Browne wouldn’t work, and those who “want a system where the interests of institutions win out when they come into tension with those of students” are the same and can be dismissed in the same way. An article which addressed all of these concerns might have been worth reading. This one wasn’t, unfortunately.

Is privatisation inherently wrong?

Hell yes.

Last night I was at a very well-attended community meeting at Meadowbank Stadium, where local councillors were invited to explain what’s happening around the plans to privatise £1bn worth of public services at Edinburgh City Council. I say well-attended, but I mean well-attended by the public, not by the councillors. All the back-office functions like HR, revenue and benefits, council buildings maintenance, cleaners etc are all involved in these plans, along with environmental services including bin collections and looking after Edinburgh’s award-winning parks. That’s an awful lot.

If you haven’t heard anything about these plans then you’re not the only one. There has been little to no effective consultation of the public, and even Gary Peacock, the Liberal Democrat backbench councillor who attended the meeting, didn’t seem to know anything about the details of the plans. Indeed although the Labour group and the Green group have consistently voted against the privatisation of services, really the only people that have been keeping track of the developments and holding the council leaders accountable for these plans have been the trades unions. It’s not the councillors who are standing up for the interests of the people; that duty has fallen to trades union organisations like Unison and PCS, who I’d urge you to support. The SNP, despite being one of the larger groups on the Council, couldn’t find anyone to attend this meeting, or the last one on the same topic about a month ago.

Anywho over the past week I’ve been asked several times what’s so bad about privatisation, so I thought I’d put a post together on the topic. I took a quick look at it a couple of months ago but it’s worth revisiting. Let’s have a list:

1) The efficient private-sector is a myth. There are only a small number of ways in which private companies can run a public service more efficiently. Let’s have another list:

• Reduce the quality of the service
• Sack people
• Pay their employees less
• Hire less qualified staff
• Reduce working terms and conditions

If the private company is being more efficient in other ways (so let’s say they change supplier and buy a necessary product at a lower price), then those options are also open to the government in-house, and the privatisation isn’t necessary. What privatisation essentially does is pass the service onto a company where the trades union representation isn’t as good, so they can treat their staff worse than they could get away with if they did it in-house. I don’t think that’s what the people want.

I’ve said it a million times before, but there are 2 types of efficiency. The one that private companies are concerned with is money earned vs money spent, whereas the one that government should be concerned with is money spent vs quality of the service. There is a real danger when you privatise services that you get a race to the bottom, where companies are willing to compromise on the quality of a service in order to slip through the cracks in procurement processes that aren’t tight enough, and thus get awarded public contracts.

Remember too that a large proportion of the money the government pays will go straight into the pockets of shareholders rather than towards paying for the service. That’s another huge layer of inefficiency which doesn’t seem to get recognised often enough.

2) It takes control of public services away from your representatives. Now if you’re not happy with a public service, you can go to your councillor and tell them, and because it’s carried out by the council, they can try to change the service. Once the service is privatised, you go to your councillor and complain about it, and they’ll send you to go and talk to a private company, and they’ll more than likely tell you to sod off, because they’re carrying out the service as it was defined in their contract, and as long as they’re doing that they’ll get paid, so they don’t give a monkeys if you’re happy with it or not. Privatisation takes the control of resources away from democratic structures. So does capitalism by the way, but there you go. The heads of the IMF and WTO aren’t elected. There’s a very specific part of this which I think deserves its own point.

3) Contracts limit democratic control over a service. Due to European tendering law, once the specification for a contract has been written, whichever company can fulfil that specification for the lowest price has to be chosen. Whilst on paper this is a good idea because it helps to prevent government corruption, in practice it is terribly limiting, and companies can often sneak through the gaps in the specification if they’re not written tightly enough, as they often aren’t. That’s why the University of Edinburgh banks with RBS, because its ethical investment policy didn’t form part of the specification when it went out to tender, and so it was legally obliged to choose RBS, to the dismay of many of its students.

It’s also not unheard of at all for private companies to stick to the exact letter of their contractual agreements, even when a higher level of service would clearly be overwhelmingly in the public interest. So as a hypothetical example whereas a school caretaker working for the council would clear the whole playground of snow, a private company might choose to just clear a path from the gate to the front door in order to stay within its contractual obligations whilst saving money. Any subsequent changes to the contract are met with huge charges.

4) There’s no guarantee that the terms of the contract can be met. As we saw with the trams fiasco, a company can claim to be able to complete a project with a certain amount of money, but then realise that they can’t do that. The council is then left with a choice, either they can give more money to this company to finish the job, or they can have a half-finished job that’s no use to the public, but which has cost the public lots of money. The threat of bankruptcy, which according to capitalist theory keeps standards high, is completely useless in this situation because it’s not just the company that loses out, it’s the people. In the case of the privatisation plans in Edinburgh, the City Council estimates it can save £90m, but what is the guarantee that they’ll be able to do so? And if the company runs out of money, where are they going to turn to to get more?

5) Private companies with dodgy records can be given contracts. Even just in these privatisation plans in Edinburgh, companies have slipped through the net and been allowed to continue in the procurement process, even though they’ve been found guilty of negligence causing workplace deaths, even though they’ve taken part in price-fixing. These companies don’t care about the welfare of their staff or the public, they care about money.

6) It’s a reactionary redistribution of wealth towards the rich. Public services primarily benefit working and middle class people because they’re the people that rely on them the most, and they’re the people that benefit from the jobs that are created by the provision of that service. Privatising that service not only risks its quality, but it also means that a big chunk of public money is taken from the pockets of the people and placed straight into the bank accounts of the rich shareholders in that company. On a small scale that’s not especially objectionable, but when privatisation is as hegemonic as it has been in the UK since the dawn of New Labour, it represents a systematic redistribution of wealth to the top.

7) Corruption becomes very real. When representatives are involved in the awarding of contracts for millions of pounds, corruption suddenly becomes a very real prospect. Not so long ago in the US we saw private prison contractors paying judges to send more kids to juvenile detention so that they’d make more money. This is the kind of thing that becomes a possibility when you start putting profit before the provision of service.

8. Privatisation is often a 1-way street. If and when it becomes obvious that a service would be better run in-house by the government, setting it up as a public service again can become impossible, because you’ve got to hire a tonne of staff, set up all the infrastructure all over again, and the cost of doing that is so prohibitive that you have to stay with the privatised arrangements, even if it’s a bad deal for the public, and the whole time you’ve got a private company that’s going to make the process of renationalisation as difficult as possible, because it’s in their financial interest to do so.

There are some situations where using private companies is understandable and possibly even beneficial. Situations where there’s a one-off job that needs doing, that requires special expertise that the council doesn’t have, and where it’s not practical to do it in-house. I’d argue that there are other ways to do those jobs, such as using central government resources and sharing them between councils. But even if you accept that premise, in this case we’re talking about privatisation of services which are already run perfectly well in-house. It’s not an extra burden that the council’s not able to deal with.

And there are plenty of examples of privatised services gone wrong. The trams in Edinburgh, BT in Liverpool, the Southern Cross nursing homes, the Elsie Inglis nursing home in Edinburgh, and the national rail service are just off the top of my head. The NHS is one of the most efficient health systems in the world (pdf)*, and is ranked #2 overall, and yet the government still wants to privatise huge swathes of it. It is ideological, not in the best interests of the public.

* I originally wrote “the most efficient health service in the world”, but that was based on 7 data points which isn’t exactly fair (HT Ian). It’s difficult to know for sure because I can’t find any papers on it, but the NHS comes 9th overall according to the WHO in 2000, and I think we spend less per capita on healthcare than all of the countries ranking higher, except for Japan. That would indicate to me that we’re probably 2nd to Japan in terms of efficiency. But the point remains, as the services near the top like Norway and Sweden, which spend a fairly comparable amount on healthcare, are almost entirely nationalised systems, and others that aren’t nationalised are very heavily regulated. Switzerland is also at the top, but it spends almost double what the UK does on healthcare.

Aaron Porter needs to get his act together

Eek – I only intended this to be a few hundred words. I suppose there’s a lot to say.

Edit: It seems a lot of people agree with me. At the march in Manchester, Porter was chased away by a group of about 200 students, and the person who replaced him to give a speech at the rally was egged and booed off the stage.

Aaron Porter is the current President of the National Union of Students. He’s a Labour careerist and he just follows the status quo, for which he’s been slated by anti-cuts groups across the UK. We’ll see him in Parliament before too long. Today he wrote this piece in the Guardian in which he defends his actions and says the NUS is ‘leading the movement’ sparked in response to the government’s attack on young people. As usual, I’ll take a look at some of his claims and give a response, as rationally as possible.

At several points in the article, he points out that the groups criticising make up a small minority and “represent few people other than themselves”, and that in contrast, he has a duty to represent all students in the debate. Really? Let’s not forget that the NUS leadership is elected under a very undemocratic system – students themselves don’t vote for the President, NUS delegates from each student union do. So Aaron Porter has the position that he has because of a poll of a small group of people themselves elected by a small minority of members (in my union about 4,000 people out of 28,000 voted in the last presidential election race – significantly less will have voted for the NUS delegate). This group is dominated by Labour careerists, and it decided not to fight for free higher education. His position has no legitimacy, so for him to criticise other groups on the basis that they don’t represent students is ludicrous.

Clearly, since he was elected under a broken system, Porter cannot claim to represent the views of students. But what he can do is try to represent their interests. I argue that he and the rest of the NUS leadership aren’t doing that. It is not in students’ interest to pay tuition fees, whether £3,000 or £9,000. It is not in students’ interest to pay a graduate tax. What is in students’ interest is free, fair and funded higher education, but NUS UK has given up on that. It’s sold out. Neither Aaron Porter nor the anti-cuts movement can claim to represent the views of the majority of students, but at least the anti-cuts movement is representing their interests.

What about Porter’s claim that the NUS has been ‘leading the movement’? I find it laughable. He gives two examples of NUS leadership: the march on 10th November, and the upcoming march in Manchester tomorrow. He also claims that the NUS called a series of campus actions – this is complete bollocks. Where groups did take action in the form of occupations, he failed to support them. He himself admitted that he was spineless in dealing with that action, the action that he is now claiming to have led. What a joke.

He doesn’t mention another ‘action’ that the NUS led: the candle-lit glowstick-lit vigil on the Thames, where a paltry couple of hundred people mourned the death of higher education, whilst around the corner tens of thousands were fighting to save it. Which of these two groups was acting in students’ interests?

I was at NUS Scotland’s candle-lit vigil outside Holyrood Parliament here in Edinburgh (there was no march happening up here, unfortunately). It was pathetic. A few too many speakers addressed a crowd of about 60 people in the dark, some holding candles but most not. A speaker from the St Andrews occupation was tagged on as an afterthought, and then speakers from other occupations were asked to come forwards, only to be denied the microphone. To his credit, Liam Burns tried to get some chants going, but it just felt wrong chanting ‘no ifs, no buts, no education cuts’ whilst holding a candle to mourn the death of higher education, and frankly it fell on its arse. The NUS has done some good things. It is good at mobilising students when it wants to be, and making Lib Dem candidates sign pledges gave the movement a focus. But right now it is not leading the movement as it should be, it is lagging far behind.

Stunningly, Porter then gives as an example of NUS leadership the fact that it is collaborating with other trades unions in organising the march tomorrow. This is a perfect example of how the NUS is lagging behind! Anti-cuts coalitions have been springing up all over the place, collaborations between anti-cuts campus groups and various trades union branches, and the NUS is nowhere to be seen! Groups like the Edinburgh Anti-Cuts Alliance, for example, have existed for months! Furthermore, trades union leaders have repeatedly called the student movement ‘an inspiration’. Do you think they’re talking about the glowstick-lit vigil? Somehow I think they’re talking about somewhat more direct action. The NUS has been lacking in its dealings with trades unions.

Porter then tries to manipulate the figures a little. Yes, over 650 unions do go into the NUS, and only a small number of those have passed motions of no confidence, but one of them was ULU, the union of the UK’s biggest university, and there are more in the pipeline. I looked at my local area to see what type of institution makes up the 650 unions figure, and lots of them are tiny 6th form colleges – less than 1% of unions doesn’t mean less than 1% of students. And how many unions haven’t yet had general meetings where motions of no confidence could happen? He is trying to imply that 99% of students approve of what he has done, when that is simply not the case; the vast majority haven’t spoken one way or the other.

Modern politics will not be swayed by street protest alone and that is why I am prepared to engage with Simon Hughes in his new role as the government’s “access advocate”.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I know the NUS’s policy of back-room deals hasn’t exactly yielded the best results for students over the past decade. ‘Engaging with the process’ seems to mean arguing for something you think you can get, rather than something you want. It seems to mean dropping your principles to get something, anything, from politics. Aaron Porter can’t look at what’s happened in the past few days in Tunisia and Egypt and tell me that nothing is achieved by street protest.

He finishes his article by lamenting that the group is infighting, implying that these anti-cuts groups should comply with his agenda. But which group is really breaking away from the other? The 200 people on the banks of the Thames, clutching glowsticks in the dark, making a lame argument for a graduate tax, or the tens of thousands of people fighting against the biggest assault on the welfare state that this country has ever seen? If he wants unity in the student movement, he can come to us.

encourage anyone who believes the government is cutting too hard and too fast to join us in Manchester on Saturday or to safely and peacefully show our campaign has moved beyond London

“Cutting too hard and too fast”… isn’t that an Ed Miliband talking point? Fuck you, Porter.

Call to action – David Kato killed

I’m due in class in less than half an hour so this will be very quick. The news broke today that David Kato, the Ugandan gay rights activist, has been beaten to death with a hammer in his own home. This follows mass hysterical homophobia which was whipped up at least partly by gay-hating Christian evangelicals from the US, and an article in Uganda’s Rolling Stone (nothing to do with the American magazine with the same name) where pictures of gay people were published next to an encouragement to hang them. The preachers then backed away as if they had nothing to do with it. I’ve been trying to follow Kato’s activities for some time, he was certainly one of the bravest amongst civil rights campaigners. Some time ago,  Rachel Maddow interviewed the Ugandan MP behind new anti-gay laws, which would sentence gay people to death in some cases. Daylight is the best disinfectant, and people like this need disinfecting, so I’ll put the first part here.

It doesn’t end there though. There’s something you can do. Brenda Namigadde, a Ugandan lesbian in the UK, has been told she will be deported back to Uganda this week, where she will almost certainly be in danger from similar attacks, especially since that same Ugandan MP has taken an interest in her case. You can sign a letter to Theresa May, the Home Secretary, who can reverse the decision. This is a problematic area, Theresa May was against the repeal of Section 28, saying that it was necessary to ‘protect children’. Apparently she thinks you can catch the gay. However, she did say last year that people who were at risk in their own countries because of their sexuality would not be deported, so there is hope. Please, sign the letter.

Anti-Cuts demonstration

I’ve spent the last couple of days in an occupation at Edinburgh University, fighting against the cuts to education proposed by the coalition government in the UK. On Wednesday a group of students took over a lecture theatre in Appleton Tower, and the group has been there since then. What do we want? We have a pledge which we want the university to sign, and that’s it. I don’t think there’s anything controversial about it, and indeed I think the university largely agrees with it. The anarchists and socialists at the uni tend to take a leading role in these kinds of things at our university, and one of the benefits of that is that decisions are made using the consensus decisionmaking process of which I’m quite fond, and which was also used in the occupation for Gaza. I’ll expand on what that is towards the end of that post but first an update on what’s happening now and what will be happening in the near future.

Security were at first very reasonable. Matriculated students could access the building at night, and even non-students could access it during the day. The University Secretary did not come to speak to us until today because they’ve been tangled in graduations. Today she came down and said they’ll give a response to the demand on Monday. Then the head of security told us that we wouldn’t have access to the building over the weekend, except for informatics students who normally have access anyway. Unfortunately I had to leave this evening for a screening of the Blair/Hitchens debate (on now) and so it’s unlikely I’ll be able to get back in until Monday morning. Until then, we have meetings in Teviot at 1pm tomorrow and Sunday for the outsiders to help plan for 2 more events happening this week.

Firstly there’s a Scotland-wide rally starting at Bristo Square, Edinburgh, on Tuesday 30th at 11.30am. We’re hoping to get a walkout from several of the local schools, and a good turnout from universities across Scotland. Tuesday night is also the EUSA AGM where there are 2 relevant motions. On Sunday, we’ll have another rally for the benefit of those who work and who are stuck in school.

I’m running out of battery so I’ll describe the consensus decisionmaking process later.

Edit: Ok, managed to get myself smuggled back inside now, I’ll be here til I go to work tomorrow afternoon. The consensus decisionmaking process is a way in which a group can make decisions and get things done without having any kind of a leader (which is why it’s so popular with the anarchists). Basically in any meeting, someone takes the role of a facilitator. Typically the group will sit in a circle but that’s not necessary. At the start of the meeting, people raise their hands to put things on the agenda, and someone taking the minutes writes it down. Then going through the agenda, people raise one hand to make a point, both hands to make a direct response to something that’s just been said, they make a P shape to suggest a proposal, and a T shape to make a technical point (something outside the discussion such as “we’re running out of time” or “the building’s on fire”). On top of that, if you agree with something someone’s said, you wave your hands, palms facing forwards. If you disagree, you move them side to side, palms facing down. That way noone gets shouted down and there’s no applause so everyone can be heard. The role of the facilitator is to make sure people aren’t ignored, and that points get prioritised properly (technical points obviously come first, direct responses come before normal points, and proposals are prioritised over general points, particularly when we seem to be exhausting a discussion).

So typically a discussion will involve various points being made on various aspects of the discussion topic, then after a while someone makes a proposal (an action to be taken, a decision to be made, or – particularly in something like an occupation where there are lots of meetings over a few days – a decision to postpone discussion until another time). The facilitator then takes what’s called a ‘temperature check’, where everyone that agrees with the proposal waves their hands, then the facilitator asks if anyone disagrees. This is the important part – the discussion does not move forwards until the disagreement is resolved in some way. So if there is disagreement, some make points for, others against, and there’s another temperature check. This can come to one of three outcomes. Either everyone ends up agreeing on one of the two options or a compromise, or the group decides not to make a decision either way given that there’s no agreement, or if only a small number of people disagree, the facilitator asks if their disagreement is a ‘block’ or a ‘stand aside’. As the name suggests, a block is used only if the group’s passing a proposal would mean they want to leave the group, whereas a stand aside is if it’s not a massive issue. If some people decide to block, the rest of the group votes on whether it’s acceptable to overrule or not. Obviously people don’t like doing this, so I’ve only seen a block overruled when there was just one person disagreeing.

I think the advantages of this system are pretty obvious. The group isn’t led by any kind of clique or leader, and it is not just a majority rule, the whole group comes to an agreement about what to do and everyone is relatively happy about what is decided. The disadvantages are that it breaks down when there is serious disagreement with a significant number of people, that it can take a long time, and that the individuals in the group will not necessarily be the same the next time, so a decision made by one group can be binding on another group of individuals. But so far it’s worked.

Muslims and immigration

Long-term readers will not be surprised to hear that I unashamedly despise Islam. Just like Christianity, I find its moral system immoral, it’s intolerant, and it’s based on shaky factual foundations. Indeed one of the few differences between Christianity and Islam is that there seem to be a great many more fundamentalist Muslims, and they seem to be more influential. That doesn’t affect me so much though.

What does affect me more, and what I see more on a day to day basis is the response to Muslims, the attitudes displayed towards them. It’s disgusting, and it makes me ashamed to be associated with people who are supposedly ‘on my side’, if such a thing existed. You see whilst I’m happy to say I hate Islam, I do not hate Muslims. Most of the Muslims I know are perfectly good and nice people, who thankfully do not follow the teachings of their religion like fundamentalists, just like most Christians don’t follow their religion to the letter.

Let’s start basic. Whenever the tabloids talk about Muslims, it’s always ‘them’ vs ‘us’. This is a very simple tool but I think it really gets to the root of it. It’s a signature mark of populism to refer to the majority as ‘us’ and then denigrate a minority by making them ‘the other’. Then they dehumanise the ‘other’. A week or so ago there was an old guy in the pub and he was talking about how the most common name for babies born in the UK last year was Muhammed. This was a Daily Mail lie, and I was happy to point that out, and when I mentioned that actually Oliver was the most popular name, the guy said “I don’t believe that.” Take it up with the Office for National Statistics then!

He then went on to say how Leicester was the first town in the UK where the indigenous population has been overrun, and this illustrates another problem; dog-whistle terminology. You see although newspapers like the Sun, Express, Mail, even the Telegraph and the Times sometimes, want to appeal to the populist bigoted masses, they have to hide behind terminology. Everyone knows what the press (and the EDL and the BNP by the way) mean when they say ‘indigenous population’. They mean white people. But they can’t say that because they’d get ripped apart, it’s too obvious. So what they do is hide behind words and myths, and the racists come flying in from all over the place, have their little rants and then take away a skewed version of reality and a chip on their shoulders. Terms like ‘ethnics’ and myths like ‘Winterval’. It helps perpetuate an untrue narrative which feeds the likes of the BNP.

Then we can see how it filters through into the general population. Comments on BBC’s Have Your Say or on the Daily Mail comments, as well as various groups set up on Facebook, say things like ‘Deport the Muslims who burnt the poppies‘ or ‘If you don’t like the England/Australian/Canadian/American flag, then I’ll happily help you pack’. Sorry but where did this assumption come from that all Muslims are immigrants? Here’s a prime example illustrating how the right-wing tabloids are deliberately deceiving, and succeeding in that deception, and yet the Press Complaints Commission wrings its hands and does nothing. It’s sickening. And since the word ‘immigrant’ has become a dirty word along with ‘asylum seeker’, they become vilified. They’re the other. They’re not us, so it’s ok to treat them like one homogenous group and then publically shit on them all in the press. And the Press Complaints Commission is so fricking toothless that they can get away with it.

Here’s another insane example of how deranged some people have become. During the whole (Not) Ground Zero (Not) Mosque fiasco, people were saying things like “When I can do what I want in Saudi Arabia I’ll let them do what they want here” or “When churches can be built in Saudi Arabia we’ll let them build Mosques here”. Let me just reiterate that. People were actually saying this. As if Saudi Arabia is a standard to live up to. And on top of that, since when is Saudi Arabia representative of Muslims? Especially the ones that have moved away from the Middle East!?

It gets worse, this is becoming the mainstream. In the last election, Labour’s manifesto had a section entitled ‘Crime and Immigration’, as if the two were intrinsically linked in some way, as if being an immigrant is a crime. That manifesto was put together by current Labour leader Ed Miliband, by the way. You’d think a guy of Jewish descent would be particularly aware of the dangers of populism, but apparently not. Was there a big outcry about this? Was there fuck. During the election campaign, Gordon Brown called a woman bigoted because she was apparently confused about where all these Eastern Europeans were flooding from (the clue’s in the question), and then apologised sincerely for his misjudgement. When Labour eventually lost, they blamed it on their weak stance on immigration. And now, as if their record is spotless, they’re kicking out Phil Woolas and pretending he’s not like them.

Why is it that in politics these days, the only acceptable answer to the question ‘where do you stand on immigration?’ is to say which one is your preferred method of curbing it? Gordon Brown was absolutely right to call her a bigot. Yes, it is the role of politicians to listen to public discourse, but they can also help shape it. Someone has to make the argument that immigration is not necessarily a bad thing, that Muslims are not necessarily bad people. I used to put my faith in the Lib Dems, but since they’ve become Tory lapdogs, there’s noone left.

Why protest against the Pope’s visit?

When I got back to Scotland, I was very keen on doing some kind of protest or demonstration against the Pope’s visit. Unfortunately most of the groups I’m involved in were either busy with other events or were reluctant to do anything because they didn’t want to be associated with the Orange Order. So I found a protest in Glasgow on Facebook, but it’s horrendously organised and it wasn’t an ideal place to stage a protest. There will be a Popemobile parade going through Edinburgh so I thought that’d be a better location. Anyway I’m in the process of sorting that out with the police, but I thought it’d be good to explain a few of the reasons why some of us will be protesting. Let’s do this as a rather boring numbered list, starting with the fairly mundane:

1. The disruption. Look at all the bus services that are being affected by the Pope’s visit to Edinburgh. Look at the roads that are being closed in Edinburgh and Glasgow.  There will be still more disruption in Coventry and London. Bin collections are being cancelled, businesses are having to close, schools are being closed, hospitals are on high alert, all so the leader of a tiny proportion of the UK’s population (1.6% if we go by mass attendance) can have his parades and his masses and be ‘adored’ from behind his 6 inches of bulletproof glass. Faith in action, as Bill Hicks would say.

2. The cost. All the current estimates for the costs have failed to include the security costs. To my recollection, the UK government was originally supposed to cover £8million of the costs of the visit, whilst the Church would cover £7million, which supposedly reflected the proportion of the visit which would be a state visit as opposed to a pastoral one. The government’s contribution went up to £12m, and soon after that up to £20m, which is where I believe it currently stands. In the grand scheme of things that’s not so much, except that looking back at past events, the security is usually by far the biggest factor, and they’re not included. Bringing George Bush to Gleneagles for the G8 cost £72 million, and although there were much bigger protests happening then and IIRC that visit was a bit longer, the trip didn’t involve any parades or open-air masses, or any of that malarkey, and he was kept in one place, so we’re looking at a comparable sum of money. The News of the World claim to have uncovered a paper which showed the Scottish portion of the security will cost a minimum of £10 million, and the starting estimate for the costs of the London element is £1.8 million. I suppose we won’t know how much the visit will cost until it happens, but it’ll certainly be more than the £1m – £1.5m that the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police has quoted today.

Don’t forget that this money is coming from the normal police budgets, budgets that are already facing massive cuts in the coalition government’s spending review. People’s jobs and people’s safety are literally on the line because of this visit. Ok, not literally because I don’t know what line that would be, but they are literally at risk.

3. The Pope’s criticism of the UK’s equality laws and its opposition to equal rights for LGBT people. Despite the fact that there is already an exemption in place for ministers and priests, the Pope claimed that the UK Equalities Act which came into force this year imposed unjust restrictions on freedom of religion, basically because it wouldn’t allow the Church to discriminate against gay people when employing people. Let’s be clear here, the Church would not be forced to employ women or gay priests, but they would be banned from discriminating against gay people for example when employing people to be a secretary, or a window cleaner, or anything else that didn’t involve religious teaching. He wanted the Church to be above the law, basically. So not only are we paying through the nose for him to come over here, but while he’s here he’s going to rub salt into the wound by criticising our hard-won freedoms which we’ve had to prise out of the claws of religious groups like his.

4. The continued subjugation of women in the Catholic Church. I’m not just talking about not letting women be priests, but every time the Church releases a statement on the family, it’s always hearkening back to tradition and the old times, which is basically saying women should stay at home and be obedient to their fathers or their husbands. Granted, this isn’t just the fault of the Catholic Church, it’s a widespread phenomenon, particularly amongst religions, since the idea of the sacred is an inherently conservative force, and especially amongst Abrahamic religions. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church’s teachings on the family, abortion and contraception limit women’s reproductive rights and help to propagate the image of women as baby-making machines, which has all sorts of consequences.

5. The promotion of segregated education. We only need to look across the water at Northern Ireland to see the damage that segregated education does. Richard Dawkins made an excellent documentary on this issue which can still be viewed on 4OD.

6. The Vatican’s appalling handling of the abuse cases within the Church. As I’ve covered on this blog before, and as I’m sure new readers will be aware, a huge number of children have been sexually abused in the Catholic Church, and rather than handing over the perpetrators to secular authorities to be punished, Bishops, Archbishops and even Cardinals have chosen instead to deal with it privately within the Church, moving paedophile priests from parish to parish, free to offend again, whilst swearing victims into perpetual silence to protect the reputation of the Church. Whilst I don’t necessarily suggest that the present Pope has been personally involved in such cases, he has certainly not done enough to punish those who have covered up abuse cases. He has not called for the resignation of bishops who definitely did cover up abuse cases, and it is evident that as a Cardinal he put the reputation of the Church well ahead of the safety of children in its charge. He issued a self-serving apology to the Irish Catholics which offered no material solution to the problem. He appointed Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor as head of the Apostolic Visitation to Ireland, himself a bishop who moved a known paedophile priest from parish to parish to reoffend. The Church has repeatedly blamed the paedophile crisis on homosexuals.

7. The Pope’s irresponsible comments about condoms and HIV. The Pope and others in the Church have repeatedly stated, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, that condoms do not help prevent the spread of HIV and that in fact they help to spread it. Abstinence-only education programmes have been shown to increase the spread of STD’s and whilst abstinence and fidelity are good ways to protect yourself from infection, it is not a choice that many women have in Africa, and condoms have been shown to be a good way to help prevent the spread of HIV and other STI’s. The Pope’s comments have undermined the work of many AIDS charities working in Africa, and have undoubtedly put lives at risk.

8. The Church’s continued silence about its role in the Rwandan Genocide. There’s not much else that can be said.

Those are some of the reasons. Notice that I have not attacked the Pope’s position as a head of state. Whether or not the Holy See is a legitimate head of state or not (and I’d say the Vatican is not much more than a palace full of old men in frocks) is irrelevant. In the sense that it’s necessary but not sufficient to justify a state visit. Kim Jong Il hasn’t had any state visit invitations recently, and if the heads of state of various other tiny countries like Macedonia or Andorra receive a state visit invitation, they won’t be parading in the streets of various cities. Seeing as the Holy See and its religion is pretty much one and the same thing, it’s only a minute distinction anyway. The Pope’s state visit should be opposed not because he is not a head of state, but because he is the leader of a Church which is completely out of touch with the majority of Britain’s Catholics, never mind the rest of the population, and which is morally corrupt. The visit will come at a great cost to the UK with relatively little benefit.

Return of the Mosquito

I remember blogging about this way back in the younger days of the blog, but my posts are horrifically badly organised so I can’t be bothered looking about it. Take a look a this little device.

Image from http://www.youth-rights-uk.org/archive/mosq.jpg

That is the Mosquito. It emits a high-frequency noise that can typically only be heard by under-25′s. It’s bloody annoying and is used to disperse groups of young people. The BBC have just put a story on their website saying that the Police Minister has ruled out a ban on this device, after the Council of Europe released a report which called for a ban.

What really infuriates me about this article and the government reponse is that it focuses almost entirely on whether the device might have health implications. That is not the point at all! The point is that such devices are obviously discriminatory. Imagine if they had a device which only affected black people, would that be allowed? Of course not! Imagine if shop premises used awkward steps to stop old people getting in with their zimmer frames, would that be allowed? No! So why is it ok if you single out young people? Do people over the age of 25 not cause problems?

“Ah” you reply, “but there’s a higher incidence of anti-social behaviour amongst young people.” So the fuck what? If there were a higher incidence of crime amongst black people, would that make racial profiling ok? Isn’t this pretty much what the sus laws in the 80′s were all about? Isn’t that what ultimately led to the infamous Toxteth riots? British society is trampling all over the civil liberties of the population, and it’s coming down heaviest on young people. We’ve already got the modern equivalent of the sus law in the form of stop and search initiatives, and no thanks to prats at the likes of the Daily Mail, anyone in a hoody is suspected of carrying a knife, and a group of 5 or 6 people standing around is a cause for concern.

Youth discrimination is rife. If it were any other demographic it would be scorned from all sides.

Anti-Vax march this Saturday in Edinburgh

This coming Saturday, 12th December, there will a protest against Swine Flu vaccines in Edinburgh, organised by the Vaccine Awareness Network (VAN). It’ll start at midday at St Giles Cathedral (well, High Kirk actually, it was only a Cathedral for 33 years in total back in the 17th Century, but that’s not related) on the Royal Mile and march down to the Parliament, finishing about 2pm.

Why am I telling you this? Because I disagree with it, obviously, and since I’m not in the country, I want you to go and ask awkward questions. You can get a more vaccination/science based commentary at ‘…and your electron microscope!‘ and at the Edinburgh Skeptics Blog, the rest of my post is just going to be a rant about the website. Read on if you like that sort of thing.

The anti-vax movement has a lot of people’s lives on its conscience, or at least it should, but this protest seems to be less about the vaccine itself, and more about compulsory vaccinations. When I read that, I was a bit taken aback. I support the vaccine, but I wasn’t so sure about compulsory vaccinations and I thought this post would reluctantly have to support the protest despite it’s probably anti-science agenda. As far as I was aware, there were no plans to introduce a mandatory vaccine. So I looked at the protest’s page (which is quite a mess, they really should have links to the different parts or something) to have a peek at their arguments. It’s a big straw man!

AFAIA there are absolutely no plans to implement mandatory vaccination. The page cites legislation (namely the Civil Contingencies Act 2004)  that allows the government to implement it during a national state of medical emergency. So, in the case of something like the Black Death coming back to haunt us, the government could implement mandatory vaccination against it. This is not going to happen this time, it is nothing to do with swine flu. So far swine flu has had a relatively small number of cases, and the death rate is also fairly low, something like 1% if I remember correctly. It appears to pose less of a risk than normal seasonal flu. They are not going to implement it in this case (and AFAIA they never have done, ever).

They seem to oppose this legislation being used in any case, and I also disagree with that. In the case of a serious epidemic, refusing to get vaccinated puts not only your own life, but the lives of others around you, at risk. Mandatory vaccination should be an option for the government in extreme circumstances.

It’s quite ironic though. They seem to have got themselves all whipped up into a frenzy over swine flu, and still somehow oppose the best known way of preventing it. Meanwhile towards the bottom of the page, there’s a section on what you can do, and the first point is:

DON’T PANIC -THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT. HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO TO SAFEGUARD YOUR RIGHT TO CHOOSE.

1. Firstly, stay calm. The vaccination business is run on fear (see swine flu page, recipe for selling flu vaccines, written by the CDC as an example). They want you to feel backed into a corner and as if you don’t have any choice.

What? You’re the ones taken in by the tabloid fear-mongering, the government have been playing down the risks about swine flu! So what is the source of this information about the government implementing vaccines? Well about halfway down the page in big bold capital letters it says:

FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO THINK THAT VAN IS OVER-REACTING, GET A LOOK AT THIS NEWSPAPER ARTICLE!

- followed by an undated clipping, which doesn’t even fully agree with what they’re saying, from the Sunday Star. Yes, the SUNDAY FUCKING STAR!! That bastion of good journalism that has pictures of tits on most of its pages, and which insists on giving almost every sentence its own paragraph! I suppose sentence structure is hard enough, they don’t want to even consider structuring their paragraphs too. According to the website, it’s actually called the Daily Star Sunday, but if it only comes out on Sunday then it’s not daily is it? AntiVax websites tend to be full of this, scaremongering stories from any rag going, as long as it has an anti-vax spin.

Fuck it, I’m wound up now, I’m going to have a look at the rest of the page. This might take a while.

But this kind of mandatory innoculation has a precedent, right? They haven’t just pulled it out of the air. Oh right, it seems that Greece has already introduced it. So the owner of this website wrote to the Greek health minister (same page but just so you don’t have to scroll to the top of the post. It’s about 2 thirds down) to complain and to get more information. She asked among other things why the mandatory vaccination had been implemented. The minister replied saying it hadn’t, and citizens had the right to refuse it as soon as they’d been given the information on it. Her reply contained, “however, why did a 31 July Reuters article say that Greece was mandating the vaccination?” Wow, a news report wasn’t accurate. That never happens. She also asks why the police will be present at the vaccination centres if it’s not to be compulsory. Maybe to prevent disturbances because of the scaremongering that’s been going on? Yet she’s still perplexed as to why they haven’t replied a second time. Maybe they have better things to do.

So then there’s a story entitled “WHO Launches Global Mandatory Vaccination Programme” Here it is:

The World Health Organization has issued a binding ‘recommendation’ to all member countries requiring them to institute mandatory vaccination programs. Under an existing multilateral agreement this formally invokes each state’s pandemic plan and puts coordination under control of WHO. For some European states the pandemic plan includes setting aside government as normal and ruling the country by a special council under control of the EU and WHO. France has already announced that it will effect a move to military rule beginning in September.

The global pandemic vaccination program will begin somewhere around the end of September and last about two months. Many countries are in the process of acquiring from Baxter, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and other pharmaceutical companies enough doses of vaccine to vaccinate their entire population twice. They remain quiet about mandatory vaccination, simply saying they will make vaccination ‘available’ to all on a priority basis. But Greece and Switzerland have already announced that their programs will be mandatory and enforced by the military. There are unconfirmed reports that Norway and Israel have done the same. The United States is preparing for military ‘assisted’ mandatory vaccination but has not explicitly declared its intentions to the public.

Source: Columbia Valley News, 14 August 2009.

See the end of that first paragraph? “For some European states the pandemic plan includes setting aside government as normal and ruling the country by a special council under control of the EU and WHO. France has already announced that it will effect a move to military rule beginning in September.” Err… what? I think someone’s having a laugh here… but it’s ok because it was in that well respected international source, the Columbia Valley News, the local community newspaper of Invermere, British Columbia. Funnily enough I googled “columbia valley news” today (December 9th) and this story, from August, was the second result. You may not know how Google works, basically it puts the pages in order according to how many links it has on other pages, that’s what allowed a googlebomb to work in the past. What that means is that people have been linking to this story left right and centre. Say, you don’t suppose that this story hasn’t been covered anywhere else, do you? I mean it’s implausible that something as important as this would be left to the Columbia Valley News to take all the credit. I suppose the BBC didn’t deem it important. Or maybe they’re in on the conspiracy too? Whaddya say, folks?

There are other stories on that website, most of them totally unrelated and dealing with how much money pharmaceutical companies make or when one time some out of date vaccines were given to people but noone was hurt, as well as an advert for alternatives to pet vaccines. Really relevant to what the protest is about, you know? But there’s another section I’ve already mentioned about what you can do. Most of it is just letter writing and things, but point number 5 reads:

Consider home schooling your child. Proposed mandates appear to be around school entry, and under 16′s can be pressured in school to consent to a vaccine in spite of parental objection.
School is not a legal requirement, only education is.

There would be a limit to what the state can do in the case of a home educated child, since he is out of the state system – particularly if he has always been home educated and never gone to school, as then there is no legal requirement to notify the education authority.

Wow, that’s extreme, especially since school vaccinations are optional. Here’s number 6, watch out for the really dodgy stats work.

9% of parents in England choose not to vaccinate at all, that’s 5 children in every 100. Another 15% refuse MMR. That’s approximately 20-25% of the population who refuse some or all vaccines. There are far too many parents with this objection for the JCVI to sue, and too many of us willing to fight, for them to be successful.

At the very least, we would be entitled to exemptions like parents get in other countries that mandate, namely philosophical, medical or religious exemptions.

Erm, I’m not sure what their source for this is, but I’m pretty sure that the 15% who refuse MMR would include the 9% who refuse all vaccines. Plus the MMR link to autism has been well and truly put to bed by a wealth of studies. Unfortunately this hasn’t made the news headlines the way the original story did so people still don’t realise they’re talking rubbish. Additionally, the piece claims 20-25% of the population. It’s only talking about parents, not the rest of the population, and I’m willing to bet that the original stats only included parents of children entering primary school. It’s nothing like 20-25% of the population!

This is turning into yet another ridiculously long piece so I think I’m going to cut it short here. I hope you can get along to the protest, and if you can, why not address some of the points I’ve raised here to the people there? See if the ordinary person going along knows why they’re there, and most importantly, if they bring up something and you’re not sure about it, google it, get the source, and think about it for a bit! Don’t take it at face value, read around the subject. The Bad Science Blogs aggregator is usually a good place to start.

Bibles in Pollock Halls? You’ve got to be joking…

Edit: Since writing this, it has come to my attention that the Christian Union actually have nothing to do with the motion (see comment dated 11/11/09). It was proposed by two of their long standing committee members, which is what led to the confusion on my part. I can only apologise for that assumption. Please note, however, that although much of the argument here is misdirected towards the CU, it loses none of its validity.

Unfortunately not. The Christian Union at the University of Edinburgh have put forward a motion for the student association’s AGM to allow themselves or another organisation to put Bibles in each of the bedrooms in Pollock Halls. If you’re a student at Edinburgh University, I urge you to read this post, although it’s likely to be quite long, and if you have a comment, if you disagree or whatever, post it here in the comments thread. I’d like to get a discussion on this motion going and hopefully get a bit of interest so that the necessary 300 students turn up to the AGM and it’s not a complete waste of time for everyone involved.

But first, a bit of history. A few years ago the Student Representatives Council passed a motion banning Gideon or any other religious organisation from putting Bibles in the rooms at Pollock Halls, the student halls. Following that, the CU proposed a motion to the general meeting lifting this ban, which got a majority of the vote, but not enough votes for it to pass (the EUSA system requires that at least 300 people vote for a motion for it to pass, they got 200 and something). This all happened before I was at uni and before the Humanist Society existed, but there are legends that when Gideon were allowed to place their Bibles in the rooms, it resulted in them being thrown out the window, torn to pieces or even in some cases burnt. I’m not exactly in favour of that but it demonstrates how a lot of students feel about evangelising on campus.

Anyway here’s a copy of the motion as it is now. As far as I can tell it hasn’t been amended so this is what will go before the general meeting. Seeing as I’m not in Edinburgh and won’t be able to attend the meeting, all I can really do about it is post a point-by-point rebuttal of what is says. This is more or less the argument I would give if I were to speak, and if I were given more time than you’re allowed at that meeting.

So, first up

The association notes: Article 9 (Freedom of thought, conscious and religion and freedom to manifest such beliefs in public and private) and Article 10 (Freedom of expression which includes the freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers) of the European Convention of Human Rights which is incorporated into UK law by the Human Rights Act 1998.

That’s absolutely true, it does say that. This is no doubt an inclusion of one of the proposers of this motion, law student David Nixon, who even managed to use the right to freedom of assembly to justify denying non-Christians access to the Christian Union earlier this year. That was bizarre, twisted logic and so’s this. He’s trying to use the right to freedom of conscience and expression to justify leaving a Christian text within the privacy of someone’s room. You have the right to express your opinion, you don’t have the right to come into my living room and do it. Interestingly, the motion doesn’t mention the second point to each of these articles, which states that these rights may be subject to conditions or restrictions in order to preserve the rights of others, among other things.

Next:

The association believes: That the Bible has had a powerful impact on Scottish Culture and is useful to the study of many disciplines including literature, history, law, social anthropology, classics, divinity and philosophy.

That’s true as well (although I’m not sure how it’s useful for the study of law – it is, of course, a perfect example of how not to do philosophy), but so what? Would you use it to justify putting the complete works of Robert Burns in every room in Pollock? The Bible is available online (this point will come up repeatedly, just to warn you), as well as in the library. Anyone needing access to it has it right there at their fingertips.

That many religions, philosophies and spiritualities respect the contents of the Bible.

Most of them consider it blasphemy, actually. Regardless, this is a popularity argument and has no place in a motion of this type.

That many students have taken comfort in a Bible passage in times of distress and this is important given that the University Chaplaincy Centre is only open 9am – 9pm weekdays and is only staffed 9am-5pm.

Let’s take a look at that claim, shall we? Nightline is also open throughout the night, but let’s leave that aside for a minute. What are common causes of distress? Maybe being a member of a disadvantaged or minority group? Say there’s a student who’s gay, but having only just moved to university, noone there knows. Quite a difficult situation, I’d say. Now say that student opens the Bible and discovers that according to that philosophy, they deserve to be put to death. Not exactly ideal. The same kind of discrimination found in the Bible refers to women, pagans, and anyone who’s not a Christian. This isn’t exactly the kind of thing that should be allowed to be placed in people’s rooms. Those who do want to consult the Bible can do so online, or in the library.

That by providing the Bible and other Scriptures the University is not necessarily promoting the contents of such texts but merely making a service available to students. There is nothing to prevent the university or EUSA attaching stickers to any books placed in Pollock making clear that the University does not endorse the views contained within such books.

Yes, it would be making a service available. A service that is already widely available on the internet, or in the library. Hardly one that is lacking at the moment.

5. That it is in the interests of promoting religious diversity and promoting freedom of expression and religion that EUSA do not prevent Bibles being placed in rooms in Pollock.
6. That the University should be a free market place of ideas and as such no view should be suppressed or censored. True tolerance would allow all views a chance to be fairly represented and would not ban the distribution of any books.

Erm, starting with number 5, no it’s not. It’s in the interest of freedom of expression and conscience to allow people to believe and express themselves as they wish in public or private. This is completely contrary to allowing people to impose the Bible onto people who aren’t interested or who hold different beliefs.

As for number 6, the Bible is not being censored. As I’ve said several times now, the Bible is available online and in the library; the University is in fact actively making it available. To claim, therefore, that it is being censored, is nothing short of ludicrous. In addition, the distribution of the Bible has not been banned. The CU is free to, and regularly do, distribute copies of their religious texts. I have 7 copies of John’s gospel given to me by members of the CU. Unless they’ve been taken away since I was last there, there’s a big box of them underneath the stairs in George Square Lecture Theatre, the very building where the AGM will take place! The only difference between them distributing them on campus, and putting them in people’s rooms, is that when they’re distributing them, people can say no. This motion just allows religious groups to push the Bible or other religious texts onto people who otherwise wouldn’t want it.

That any group or society representing any particular point of view who wish to provide literature to be placed in every room in Pollock should be allowed to do so providing the books are made available freely at their own expense.

Oh so we’re not just talking about religious groups? So why don’t we allow the Socialist Society to put a copy of the Communist Manifesto in each room? Of course in response, the Conservative and Unionist Society will want a copy of their literature in the rooms too, and so will any other organised group out there. The University already has this kind of resource available, it’s right next door to George Square and it’s called the Main Library! But that last part, about the books being made available freely “at their own expense” is an interesting addition, I wonder why they put that in? Could it be that they know the CU, with its large membership and funded by the UCCF, is the only group on campus that would be able to afford such a project? Methinks so. More on that later.

The Association resolves: To mandate the President of EUSA to represent these views to Accommodation Services so that the situation can be returned to what it used to be prior to the SRC deciding Bibles
should be removed from Pollock.

You mean returned to what it was before progress was made, right?

Secularists tend to have two responses to this kind of problem. The first, very prominent in the States, would be to allow every group, religious or not, to put their book in the rooms. This is how ludicrous situations like the Washington State nativity scene come about. The second would be to not allow any groups to do it. I favour that option, and here’s why. It doesn’t matter if you give access to all groups, the big fish will always be able to dominate, in this case the CU will be able to put the Bible in the rooms and other groups will struggle. Then we’re back to the situation, where one group is favoured over another, that we were trying to avoid in the first place!

So that is why we shouldn’t pass this motion. Agree? Disagree? Put your comments here!

There are also a number of other motions going through the AGM which are of interest. One is about taking action against Israel, and another is about not giving a platform to discriminatory groups on campus. Maybe I’ll put a similar post up about that one. But regardless of where you stand on any of these issues, go to the AGM and vote! It’s on the 17th November 7pm in George Square Lecture Theatre.