Scots Wha Hae

Stop me from generalising but, meet the average Scot, and you'll marvel at the sheer dourness that encircles them as they bewail their misery and misfortune.

Even when nothing that bad has actually happened, there's normally an arsenal of enemies awaiting character assassination, or an assortment of seemingly miserable anecdotes, to regail onlookers with over a pint or two on a Friday evening

People like to say this attitude is based on a Calvinist understanding of life that sees pleasure as sin - one that certainly resonated with my parents who approved of anything they deemed 'character-building' - but I think it's equally to do with the pleasure of watching others squirm from behind their rose tinted spectacles, as we methodically destroy their naive world views.

The funny thing is, dourness is something we Scots actively enjoy. Yankee style positivity and platitudes simply don't work in our neck of the woods. Black humour is considered the thinking man's opiate and - even when things are working out famously, with your job say, or your fiance - it just wouldn't be the done thing to applaud success or happiness, at least, not without puncturing it with the odd jibe.

I grew up with that approach to life, and it's one I both understand and appreciate. More than anything, curiously, I enjoy the looks of bewilderment passed at us by passing foreigners who simply don't get why, for the love of God, we are not more positive about life. For many Scots, moaning is a kind of humourous code, a bit of mindless banter.

But if we're not careful, it gets too wrapped up in the way we view the world, blinding us to the good things and making us focus exclusively on the bad.

As such, I've resolved to try and free myself from the desire to moan, mostly because it breeds apathy instead of action in the face of difficult situations that it would be a good deal better just to move on from and forget instead of dwelling, Bannockburn style, on the injuries of the past.

After spending far too much time resenting an array of people in my address book I am going to take the advice of Selim, the prisoner condemned to life in a light-less dungeon in Tahar Ben Jelloun's magnificently dark, yet inspriing, novel 'This Blinding Absence of Light', in which he says:

'I had no enemies. I was not giving into my worst instincts any more. I understood how draining it was to spend my time chopping into pieces all those who had done me harm. I had decided not to bother and that is how I got rid of them, which amounted to killing them without dirtying my hands or stewing forever in the desire to repay them with the same misery they had inflicted on me.

I had to move beyond the idea of revenge once and for all , become impervious to (it)...because revenge smelled strongly of death and did not solve any problems. Search as I might, I found noone to detest. This meant I had returned to a state of mind I loved above all others: I was a free man'

Moving On...

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. Anais Nin

Before I left York for Brussels my flatmate offered me a piece of advice: never go back.

She was right. In the year since I moved back to Brussels I've been totally unable to recreate the sense of exploration and excitement that kept me motivated here first time round.

Despite the champagne and the shopping I've been unhappy, resentful, and running to stand still, forcing myself to go through the motions of appearing interested in Commission communications on budgetary policy, asking myself the unanswerable question: should I stay or should I go?

Well, now I have my answer. And whether I jumped, or was pushed, or it was a combination of both, doesn't reduce the relief I feel that - for better or for worse - it is time to move forwards and get the hell outta here!

Sure, everyone is scared of change. But I had a revelation of sorts last week: two years off thirty, I'm damned if all those dreams I put in one corner of my mind and shut off for some uncertain 'later' will never come to fruition.

If there are things I feel need to be seen and done, aspects of me, my life, my attitudes, that need changed, then now is the time to see them, do them, change them.

Definitively.

What I liked about Herman Hesse's Siddharta is the idea that life is a series of cycles.

You can either live one sole cycle, doing what you were essentially 'born to do' because of your family background of situation or, having explored all the possibilities, and fallen into all the pitfalls, of one way of living, learn from those and move on.

Well I'm fed up of making the same old mistakes over and over and over again. I know I was wrong about a lot of things but, seriously, basta.

It's time I started learning from my mistakes, not just to save myself the pain of repeating them ad nauseum but because I think it's our moral duty to others in general to be the best people we can be.

So I am going to take a break, finish that thesis - well, if possible - and get my head in the right place so that when I next make a decision about the future its based on far, far more than simple fear of moving forwards.

Better Living Is A Science

To update from my last post, I can now state that - in some matters at least - better living certainly is a science.

After drinking far more than is remotely advisable at a staff party last night (yes, that was a Tuesday night and yes, that is as bad as it sounds, and yes I will have to live with the teasing for weeks to come) I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that moderation in, or indeed total abstention from, the consumption of alcohol is a preferable state of being.

It also helped me lose 7 kilos over the last two months.

Game set and match to sobriety.

I am pleased that I have resolved this moral dilemma. On to the other 99.9%.....

In God We Doubt

As someone who spends longer than can ever be considered healthy obsessing about theological issues, I have come to remarkably few conclusions. So few, that I have been forced to subscribe to Olin Miller's assertion that "to be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it". I guess that's my cynical pragmatism at work.

However that doesn't stop me wishing I could believe in something - really believe in a way that gives my life a purpose I can dedicate myself to, rather than forcing myself to swallow a grain of truth surrounded by a load of claptrap for the sake of a little solace, which seems to be the failure of most religious texts I've explored. Many people say that historical context and exegisis brings more clarity. But, no matter how much I read, I'm simply not there yet.

I also consider it rather unfair that so many so called Holy Books have rocked up on the earth's shores. It's hard enough working out, after many years of painstaking research, whether one of them stacks up let alone comparing them to the beliefs of Incas, Hare Krishna's or even just the other major world religions.

So imagine how pleased I was to discover this excerpt from a new book by John Humphrys entitled In God We Doubt. I remember the marxist vicar Giles Fraser well from my time at Wadham when he was our college chaplain.

One particular sermon of his on The Matrix and the meaning of modern life was instrumental in changing my understanding of British society at the tender age of 19, an understanding only reinforced by works like Affluenza and I Fought the Law which, despite their slightly hysterical tone, have helped prevent me ever becoming a fully functional member of a society obsessed by consumption, pleasure, and distraction.

As Humphrys himself acknowledges "For those of us who are neither believers nor atheists it can be very difficult. Doubters are left in the deeply unsatisfactory position of finding the existence of God unprovable and implausible, and the comfort of faith unachievable. But at the same time we find the reality of belief undeniable".

I agree with him that while most attempts to justify belief in God seem hopelessly naive, the hopelessness of postmodernist thought, in which we are supposed to be satisfied with a life of pleasure with nothing at the end of it, doesn't make a great deal of sense either. In fact, if human beings, like other creatures, were supposed to exist happily without a sense of an external creator why did they all go to such great lengths to create one?

After all is said and done, "There remains what the atheist philosopher AC Grayling calls “the lingering splinter in the mind . . . a sense of yearning for the absolute”. There is a profound longing for something that will stimulate and satisfy emotionally and spiritually.

In the end our choice, as Humprhys points out, is to accept the conclusion reached by Jean-Paul Sartre that “There is no purpose to existence, only nothingness” or see the purpose in religion either as revealed truth, and therefore meaning, or as a social tool that is somehow in tune with the needs of human nature, and without which we function less well.

I suspect this will be top of my wish list for my birthday.

Losing our Religion

I came across a comment in today's Times by Britain's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks which struck me as true.

I respect the Rabbi greatly because he is one of the few religious leaders whose writings provide a cogent critique of modern Western ethics and can appeal to readers beyond narrow sectarian confines.

This is what he has to say on the relationship between belief in God and what it means to be a human being which, in turn, has major implications for each individual's sense of purpose and of moral responsibility.

Religion claims human beings were granted dominion over all the earth. And while many would take issue with this interpretation in today's secular climate, the fact of the matter is that our dominion has never been so noticeable, so widespread, nor so destructive as it is today.

Fish stocks are almost exhausted.

Rising sea levels and global warming bring flooding and desertification in equal measure, reducing the amount of available farmland and forcing record numbers to migrate from their stricken homelands.

Species and languages are dying at unprecedented rates as globalisation's ugly cousin, homogeneity, attacks the world's natural diversity in the search for a quick profit or a sous to feed a growing family.

This is dominion all right. But it is thoughtless tyranny, dominion of the worst kind. Human beings, many argue, have a moral responsibility to themselves, to future generations, to the planet itself, to preserve the fruits of nature and cease their destructive behaviour.

But on what basis?

Rabbi Sacks points out that in the monotheistic religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam,
dominion is and must be interpreted as stewardship: the recognition that living things are to serve humanity but human beings, as part of their dominion, are required to look after all living creatures.

On this reading, failure to care for the thing we exert power over is equivalent to acting inhumanly, to being inhumane in our treatment of other living things. For Rabbi Sacks, a God-centred view of human existence is one in which man (through his intelligence, his judgement, and his love for creation) can elevate himself to the viewpoint of the divine.

Failure to harness this spiritual side, however, results in an abasement that puts us on a par with non-sentient creatures.

An abasement born, if you will, of wilful ignorance because mankind's capacity for intelligent thought and forward planning is far far greater than that of other mammals. They exist. We order existence. Failure to exercise what clerics call God-given reason is thus the equivalent of acting against our (better) nature.

By contrast, modern scientific thought - as it is used by humanists and other secular groups - defines humanity as something far more limited and, fundamentally, pre-programmed: as Rabbi Sacks points out, "we are part of nature; nothing more".

A statement published in 1997 by members of the International Academy of Humanism, and distinguished scientists, philosophers and novelists, defines homo sapiens as a member of the animal kingdom stating:

"Human capabilities appear to differ in degree, not in kind, from those found among the higher animals.

Humankind's rich repertoire of thoughts, feelings, aspirations and hopes seems to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument can discover.”

This in turn gives rise to questions about the nature of our responsibility towards the planet and its creatures.

If we are programmed to be selfish, greedy, and destructive what possible reason could we have for stopping such tendencies for moral reasons rather than reasons of self interest?

I am not suggesting for one moment that the non-religious don't have a sense of ethics. I am simply saying that different definitions of humanity lead us to employ different forms of rationale.

Note that much of the current discussion on climate change is not about the rights and wrongs of exterminating animal and fish species, it's about ensuring their sustainable use for economic growth.

Under this way of seeing it does not matter much if the salmon comes from a salmon farm or lives wild. The essential point is that it is there for human consumption.

The modern view of human beings stresses our biology. In turn, we objectify animals, seeing them only as the source of meat or leather, as opposed to beings which have an equal right to inhabit the earth and are deserving of reasonable treatment.

If you have ever looked in a cow's eyes, let alone stroked your neighbour's cat as it sits on your knee, you will have had the feeling that a being, any being, is a good deal more than that.

Rabbi Sacks writes that "When human beings lose faith in God they lose faith in human beings" and indeed, the sacredness of creation.

Why?

Because without an extra-biological purpose informing our actions, he claims, "We will have knowledge without wisdom, technology without reticence, choice without conscience, power without restraint".

Only when we rediscover life as a miracle of creation, instead of trying to maximise its returns, will we rediscover our full potential as human beings.

The Happy Teetotaler

Well I never thought I'd find myself saying this, but I'm becoming a happy teetotaler :)

I first tried the no alcohol experiment during Lent last year and it was, quite frankly, one of the most psychologically horrendous experiences of my entire life.

Counting the days and hours to go before I could next indulge in my preferred tipple, I wound myself up to the extent that I was conscious 24/7 of what I was missing out on.

Then I'd fall off the wagon, have a couple, feel guilty, and fantasise some more about the day there'd be no arbitrary limit to my G and T consumption...

Of course, come the end of Lent there was a counter-reaction of major proportions.

All the pent up desires for champagne cocktails, Belgian beer, single malts, or a simple pint of ale, resolved themselves in a six-month long fiesta that probably inflicted more damage on my poor liver than if the month and a half of abstention had never happened.

Notwithstanding last year's false start I decided to do the same again, if only to attempt to break the cycle of receptions and dinners that was adding metres, not centimetres, to my waistline.

And I'm pleasantly surprised to find it's a lot easier this time around.

Perhaps I'm just more self-aware, more mature, or just tired of over-indulgence. Perhaps it's because the calorie count of a glass of Chardonnay has finally been rammed home. Perhaps it's just because I hate hangovers even more than I love alcohol.

Whatever the reason, I feel like I don't want to go back to those old ways. I had a beer the other day - cheating I know! - but I didn't feel guilty unlike last year, when I mentally chalked up all my black marks and flagellated myself with them. I want to be in a position where a drink is just a drink, not two, three or four.

And as I was sitting in a Sushi place last night sipping green tea with a friend who's the life and soul of the party but a confirmed teetotaler for well over a year now (black outs and bad boys put an end to that apparently) I realised I was actually a lot happier like that than rolling into bed after my traditional 'few'.

If only I could transfer that attitude to my smoking habit. But noone's perfect, right?

Questionable Facts

At last!! Proof that a taste for expensive restaurants, drinks receptions, and sedentary office life does not lie at the heart of my weight control issues. It's not my lifestyle that's to blame for being a few pounds overweight - it's my genes. Thanks Mum. That should keep her quiet the next time she gets on at me for not being a size 10...

Except that it doesn't add up. After all, almost noone was obese fifty years ago - and the gene pool hasn't changed much in that time. Even if some people find it harder to control weight than others genes can hardly explain the obesity epidemic that's hit the country.

Facts are facts. Sixty percent of British people will be obese by the year 2010 because modern life is bad for our health. The majority of people exist off diets permeated by rich, fatty, nutrition-free convenience food - because they are too busy to sit down and cook. We live lives of sloth, trapped in offices like those mice scientists use for experiments, and then express surprise at the expanse of flab around our middles.

Fad diets won't change that. Only a lifestyle revolution can. And that has got to start with challenging the efficiency epidemic that encourages these characteristics in the first place

Putting the Pieces Together

''Lebanon is more than a country - it is a message.'' So said the Pope when he visited Beirut in 1997, as the country was picking up the pieces of civil war and its way towards peaceful coexistence. ''A country of many religious faiths, Lebanon has shown that these different faiths can live together in peace, brotherhood and cooperation.''

Since then, Hariri's assassination, the 2006 war with Israel, and the recent murder of General Francois Hajj - tipped to become head of the army as part of the effort to resolve Lebanon's presidential impasse - have strained that metaphor to breaking point. But its relevance remains.

If Christians, Sunnis, Shia, Druse, and Jewish people cannot live in peace in Lebanon - where they have coexisted for millennia - what hope is there for the modern multicultural state, where doctrines of ethno-natural unity are increasingly challenged (the far right would say 'undermined') by migration and labour mobility?

Prior to this, my first trip to Lebanon, I would have been equally sceptical . Constant reference to sectarian tension across the media over the past few months seemed to point to the fact that these people simply couldn't live together, despite the best efforts of an elite political class to find consensus. Yet on arrival I found that the opposite is true.

Most people I met, from all sides of the religious spectrum, agreed they couldn't trust their politicians and that it is foreign interference, not personal grievance, which is responsible for much of the tension. Many also point to the quota system, whereby posts are parcelled out by politicians on strict sectarian lines, as a major factor in discouraging national unity. Change, they believe, can only come from the bottom up when citizens - tired of war, enmity and insecurity - take on their leaders and demand a fresh start.

It has worked before. Mass demonstrations following the murder of former PM Rafik Hariri, where sixty percent of the country, largely peacefully, picketed the parliament - leaving only young children, the elderly, and infirm at home - forced the Syrians out. And although Damascus' influence still hangs over the country, popular protest has largely delegitimised it.

I wouldn't want to speak too soon on the Lebanese situation. As my travelling companion pointed out, you only start to understand Lebanon once you realise how complicated the whole country is. However I do believe, from my brief exposure to its form of multiculturalism, that this country can give Europe some pointers when it comes to countering the recent upsurge in support for extreme right ideologies.

From what I was told, Lebanon's problems stem from politicisation of difference in the aftermath of Ottoman occupation, both during the French protectorat where Christians were given the upper hand, and post-independence, as part of the struggle over who had the right to claim the country for its respective tradition.

Conversely, the rise of racism and xenophobia in Europe is linked to the perceived threat to our dominant cultural norms by recent immigrants, be these norms secular - as is the case in France - or religious. Whether it's bans on Christmas nativity plays or bans on headscarves, there's a war being fought on our continent on whose sensitivities win the day. Yet one thing we have not realised -that the Lebanese have, after decades of fruitless civil war - is that there can be no winner in these stand offs.

We can - and they did - argue long and hard about who has the 'right' to dominant cultural expression but if we cannot recognise the diversity that exists on the ground (much of which, in Europe's case, was simply airbrushed out of the history books for the fiction of national unity in the face of minority cultures ) then we will never reach a resolution to current problems.

With time, Britain absorbed the Angles, the Saxons, the Picts, the Vikings, the Normans and the Danes. It welcomed Jews, Irish and Italians who now fit seemlessly into our understanding of who we, the British people, are. Why should we not expect the same from the cultures of recent migrants, while acknowledging that it will take a while for the rough edges to be smoothed through cultural acclimatisation?

The Lebanese example does not show sects mixing to the point of homogeneity - as Europe's integrationists, and many policy makers, increasingly demand. It does not demand an iron secularism, that precludes religious debate, for nowhere is religion a stronger force than in this tiny territory. Equally, experience of war exposes the pretence of the extreme right that the majority can simply exercise an iron fist over the minority and 'send them all back home' without a measure of violent payback.

With 12% of Europe's population of migrant descent, and growing, we are well past the point where people should seriously be entertaining old ethno-national ideas of cultural supremacy. But we are. A 2004 poll revealed that 33% of Europeans consider themselves racist, yet Europe needs migrants like never before to support its growth and social services in the face of population decline. Why? One reason must be the propensity for our leaders, like the Lebanese, to use these problems to their own advantage and create electoral dividends.

When people like you and me stop simply listening to media scaremongering, and go out and meet our neighbours, learn to understand their differences, and start to treat them as human beings, then - and only then - will we find the kind of solutions we can all learn to live with.

To Greet or Not to Greet?

Christmas Cards. A time honoured way of keeping in touch. An opportunity to send out some festive cheer at an otherwise gloomy time of year. A chance to donate to charity without buying fair trade products you never really wanted.

An ecological disaster??

Think about it. All that paper produced, then discarded. All those postal miles involved with their atendent emissions (unless you're using a pigeon or the services of a friendly group of Boy Scouts who run around your neighbourhood with a satchel). All that money wasted on disposable goods.

Is this the kind of social institution the ecologically-minded should partake in at Christmas? After all, religious festivals are times when we should be thinking more about our values, and how to exercise them in daily life, not simply abandoning them to conventions.

There are many who resolve this dilemma by way of 'e-greetings'. These can be all singing, all dancing affairs, that let you deal with all your pesky friends and relatives in one batch mailing. And at little, or no, expense. But somehow, it's not quite the same.

Now, I don't think I am being overly sentimental or nostalgic here. It's just that the effect is in direct proportion to the effort involved. Just ask any lobbyist. That's human nature.

If someone remembers you, puts in the effort to find your current address, and scribbles a personal greeting on paper (especially given how little we hand-write anything these days!), it makes the world seem a better, friendlier, more considerate place. It'll sit on the mantlepiece for weeks, be read and re-read, maybe even stored away as a mark of human warmth.

If someone sends the same mass greeting to everyone they've ever met it will be opened and deleted without the same magic ingredient - remembrance. It's intangible, ephemeral, lacking in personal thought. So, in a curious way, not only does it not convey its purported 'best wishes' but it acts as a reminderof all that is lacking in many human relationships. Others seem remote, distant, cold. And that is most certainly not the message of Christmas, let alone the intention of the average sender.

Christmas is one of the few times we really take the trouble to remember friends and family. That's why we need to continue to take the trouble to show them we care. And the less virtual communication involved, the better. After all, it's only once a year folks. And if you really don't want to send a card? Make a phone call or pay them a visit instead ;)

Join the Fight Against 'Inactive Women'

I've long maintained that, despite its ostensible focus on individualism, our society is becoming increasingly one-dimensional and conformist.

One casualty of the capitalist-materialist world in which we live is that the family, indeed, human relations in general, is paid little more than lip service by policy makers who view life exclusively in economic terms.

People are no longer treated as citizens but workers, taxpayers and consumers who matter, if at all, only in terms of their productivity and spending power. Little attention is paid to what other factors are necessary for a pleasant, fulfilling, and ultimately ethical, stay on this planet of ours.

Thus people are educated not so they can gain knowledge, insight, or creativity but so they do not place a burden on the state. Innovation is important not to improve lives but so we can produce more, faster, than ever before. Witness so-called labour saving devices, which, far from giving us more time for leisure and family, simply allow us to spend more hours in the office.

People must keep healthy not so they can profit more from life but so they can work harder. Of course, if they are so foolish as to smoke, or to get old, then they must accept being treated as human trash for which our economy (read society) no longer has any use.

It is clear that the 'government machine' is more interested in perfecting its various systems - the prison system, the education system, the health system - sorry, 'service' - than responding to the real and varied needs of human beings.

This is disturbing because it means that citizens have gone from being the ideological end, to the means, of democratic government. Ministers are more interested in managing the systems in place than rethinking them in terms of what citizens actually want.

That wouldn't be so bad European States claimed to be feudal oligarchies instead of liberal democracies - then we would all understand the deal. But we are simultaneously proferred the illusion of political choice by parties whose policies are little different and no real means of changing anything.

What if I don't want to live in an atomistic, selfish, and material society where consumer goods are prioritised - for example - above social relations and solidarity. What if I don't want to live in a society where I only really exist if I am young, pretty and dynamic? What happens if I don't want to live in a society where the old, infirm, disabled or simply dumb, are sidelined? Where everyone must conform - or be discarded.

No-one is spared this relentless economisation (if that's indeed a word). Witness a recent European Commission press release which pointed the finger at all the inactive women out there who are sacrificing their economic prime to - gasp - raise their children, look after their parents, and get an education.

Not surprisingly, the UK won the war against 'inactive women' before anyone else. That is the predictable legacy of Thatcherite policies that cut welfare for (single) mothers and force children into full-time schooling at the age of three. Compared to our near neighbour Ireland, where 30% of women are 'inactive' due to family responsiblities, the figure in Britain is only 1.9%.

However I fail to see why this should be a blueprint for the rest of Europe to follow. A few more statistics are necessary to see why. Britain has the lowest productivity and job security on the continent - surely no coincidence. British kids are the most depressed in Europe according to recent OECD figures, have the lowest educational attainment in the EU, and are most likely to take drugs and be involved in knife crime.

Perhaps it's time we stopped taking such a reductive attitude towards work-life balance. It is not good enough just to shove as many people as possible into professions. It is also necessary to raise non-dysfunctional children into a society where people can once again learn to take responsibility for their local community, environment, and yes, occasionally, their own family.

Not that this should be too prescriptive. I am a firm believer in the fact that what works for one, will not necessarily work for all. But people should be given a real choice, and a real voice, when it comes to determining the priorities that drive our society, and indeed, their own lives. Forcing all women into the workplace is as violent a violation of our rights as the Victorian practice of forcing us to stay at home with our children.

Customer Service, Belgian Style

I have done a number of posts in the past about Belgium's peculiar attitude towards the customer. And the stories just keep on coming.

Not only does customer service, as the Western World knows it, simply not exist here but I'd be surprised if Belgians were even aware of the concept.

What we have instead is some kind of proto-Soviet attitude that means the service provider is doing YOU a favour, rather than the other way round. This is partly because monopolies are still such a part of life here. Every commune is linked to a specific gas, electricity, or cable company so you either go through them, or go without.

As such, I find myself having to visit friends in a different commune to watch BBC 2 which is unavailable in Ixelles, but available over the road in Etterbeek. No one has yet taken me up on my offer to let them watch Rai 2, Italy's answer to the BBC, featuring semi-naked girls in cages and endless chat-shows.

Rather less surprisingly, this attitude is firmly engrained in the so-called public services. Now I cannot really argue with transport in this country. Trains run on time, there are eco-trams galore, and nothing is too expensive. However they are rather less than flexible.

Witness a recent train trip I took to Ypres with a friend to visit the World War One Battlefields. I arrived, somewhat late, at the platform and she had bought the ticket in advance. I say ticket because, despite asking for 'deux aller-retour' both our names were on the one piece of paper. No problem, I thought to myself, we'll sort this out later.

That evening, after our tour, we returned to the station. I would just like to point out that Ypres 's main income derives from the countless Brits, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, who come to see the trenches and cemeteries for themselves.

So when I approached the station attendant I was a little surprised to note that his English was rather patchy. I intimated the problem, accompanied by lots of ticket waving and pointing. Two people, one ticket, I mimed. I want to leave now (the train was about to pull up), she wants to leave three hours later, after the last post is played at the Menin gate.

"No problem", he said, "that will be 7 euros 90". I was taken aback. "But I've already paid for my ticket", I said. Thinking he hadn't understood the first time, I pointed out that we didn't want to travel together. "OK, then, he said, that'll be 7 euros 90". Frustrated, I raised my voice, at which point his English, rather conveniently, disappeared altogether.

I tried again in French. After all, the Flemish are always praised for their linguistic aptitude and it is an official language of Belgium, after all. He replied in Dutch. Language Politics - what a nightmare.

The train drew out of the station. I paid my seven euros and went to the bar.

It's Another Case of Blair versus Brown

People say politics these days is all style over substance. After a decade of Smiler's spin, followed by Blair-lite Cameron, it seemed that what we all craved, what we all longed for, was a little more content. Apparently we overestimated ourselves. But is that such a bad thing?

First Ming the Merciless, the Liberal Democrats elder statesman, went the way of the Dodo because he was deemed too old and uncharismatic to revive the Party's flagging fortunes. Now Brown the Steady, torchbearer of reason and responsible policy making back in the dark days of Tony's wars of religion, has become something of a national liability.

The media cites incompetence. But I'm hard pressed to see how the mistakes of an Inland Revenue underling in Newcastle, or under-funded political rivals, can really be blamed on the Prime Minister, even if he had known about them at some level. And they certainly needn't have spiralled so far out of control.

Gordon Brown's problem is not so much what happened but how he handled it. Tony Blair managed to cause civil war in Iraq, sell honours for cash, and make parents pay thousands for their child's education and he still survived.

Politicians make a hash of things all the time. That comes as no surprise. All the public expects from them, I suppose, is a modicum of sleek professionalism when it comes to handling difficulties. Some convincing spin to lend style, polish, and coherence to even the most preposterous of situations.

Why? Because no one likes to watch leaders losing control of a situation, however much they might enjoy backbiting. Indeed we almost admire it, a politician who can rise to the challenge, shrug off his opponents with a pointed quip, and stare down adversity - even when he is in the wrong.

"Making chaos out of order" as Vince Cable MP described it the other day, is the worst of politics' cardinal sins precisely because it reinforces the public's worst fear that life, the world, and everything, is infinitely more chaotic and unmanageable than we dare admit.

We expect politicians to reassure us with at least the semblance of order, in the same way that we expect political ideologies and manifestos to give us the semblance of choice and control. When either becomes unstuck we are faced with the fact that politics is largely a matter of amateur guesswork rather than the science of government.

So when it comes to the contest between Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne I know who I' m going to vote for. Up until yesterday, when I attended the hustings in the European Parliament, I was convinced Huhne was my man. He has ideas, writes well, comes to the point. An original thinker, a new departure, a man capable of reconciling social liberals and economic liberals? So it looked on paper.

In the flesh however, I was struck by the feeling there was no real contest. While Huhne is clearly capable of providing the Party with the intellectual thrust it needs he doesn't seem to have the empathy, engagement, or conviction to sell his ideas - and make others believe in them. It was like he had simply memorised his briefing and trotted it out, with a couple of compulsory 'human interest' stories thrown in, when he was in fact the leading force behind much new Party policy.

Nick Clegg, by contrast, whose Leadership campaign stole most of its ideas from other Members, and who doesn't seem to be at the cutting edge of Lib Dem policy making (if such a thing exists) came across as ideologically involved and believable. He had heart, charisma, humour in abundance. And by combining these with some intelligent, well-balanced responses, managed to win over an audience which had previously seemed quite evenly split.

That is not to say either would be a bad choice. They are both very capable people who, in my opinion, stand head and shoulders above the Iron Chancellor and Chameleon Cameron. But seeing them together in a room reminded me of nothing less than Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. And for all his faults, Blair's decade-long premiership gives me hope that Clegg, rather than Huhne, has the capacity to lift my party from the doldrums and restore its credibility amongst the wider public, just as Blair did Labour's. That's why he'll now get my vote for Leader.

Quo Vadis Scotland?

Following on from the previous post I thought I'd illustrate our bleak national character with Alistair Reid's much-vaunted poem 'Scotland'.

The interesting thing about this poem is not just its merciless critique of the Scots but the author's merciless attitude towards it now.

The 100 Poets Gathering in 2007 was brought to an extraordinary close when he stood, read it one final time, and burnt it.

Why? Not only because he felt he was being overly-defined by this one piece of poetry, but because Scotland in 2007, he felt, was very different from Scotland in 1971 when it was composed.

'Scotland', he said, was obsolete because Scotland has changed, moved on, abandoned its Reformation misery for a more cosmopolitan, international, less guilt-ridden existence.

I'm inclined to disagree and say rather that it has only just started to change.

Compared with the rest of Europe it is really rather isolated and inward looking, with fewer immigrants and cultural influences from outside (not counting the Poles who have come in such large numbers that we now have roadsigns and newspapers in Polish).

Furthermore, after devolution and the advent of the Scottish Parliament, it has actually become more parochial in recent years, with a press corps firmly fixated on affairs in Holyrood at the expense of the rest of the world.

This tendency may or may not be exacerbated by an SNP administration which, to give it credit, is at least Euro-friendly (cod wars aside) and has a strong record on strengthening relations with small EU member states on which it often models itself.

But back to our national charaacter. Does a nationalist election victory point towards the need to distinguish a Scottish spirit different from that of our confreres in the south? And if so does that mean turning back the clock and embracing Knoxian puritanical ways as the soul of Scotland? Only time will tell. I wonder what the rest of you think?

SCOTLAND - Alastair Reid

It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,

when larks rose on long thin strings of singing

and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.

Greenness entered the body.

The grassesshivered with presences, and sunlight

stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.

Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,

the woman from the fish-shop. 'What a day it is!'

cried I, like a sunstruck madman.

And what did she have to say for it?

Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves

as she spoke with their ancient misery:

'We'll pay for it, we'll pay for it, we'll pay for it!'

A Marriage Made in Hell?

Scots are ascetic, Calvinist people. You can tell by our dress, our food, our temperament. Plain, unadorned, drab even, at first glance, this grim picture is leavened with an irony and self-deprecation that brings colour to our culture and saves us from ourselves.

Perhaps things are changing now: the glitz of a Glasgow night out, all fishnet tights and sequined tops, bespeaks a society unafraid of enjoyment though still too repressed to be capable of it while sober. Yet Scotland is still very much a product of, and prisoner of, mentalities ushered in during the Reformation. Mentalities which have affected Scottish cultural life in myriad different ways.

George Mackay Brown called us the "Knox-ruined nation". Works of religious art, rivalled only by those existent in Flanders, were destroyed by the iconoclasts in the mid 1500s. Along with them, he says, went a tradition of song, theatre, and story-telling going back to pagan times. After Knox, many argue, Scotland lost its medieval Catholic colour and staggered out of the Reformation in mournful black.

Like a modern-day Iraq or Afghanistan our nation turned its back on the 'heretic' past to embrace the austerity and uniformity of fundamentalist Protestantanism - an ideology that eschewed the power of images or words to bring our fallen humanity closer to God and scorned its ability to comfort in times of need. And it is only in recent times, when the Kirk lost its moral and social authority, that Scotland has opened up to change.

This is one, perhaps even the prevailing, reading of the legacy of the Scottish Reformation on Scottish culture. But is Scotland really as artistically stunted as some critics have suggested? Richard Holloway, former Anglican Bishop of Edinburgh and patron of the Scottish arts set out to explore this question when he gave the St Andrew's Day lecture on "religion and art: a marriage made in hell" at Scotland House last night.

I was aware of Bishop Holloway's rather unconventional approach to religion. After all, he famously said that the Bible was an anachronism that needed to be updated to reflect liberal humanist ethics. He has led campaigns to ordain gay priests and ensure equality for all in the church, regardless of sexual orientation. He is a member of the BMA steering group on ethics and genetics and come out in favour of embryo research. He likes High Anglican traditions and incense, for heaven's sake. So I rather expected he would second Mackay Brown's point.

He started as if he were going to do so, by claiming that Scotland had never understood the basic distinction between the artist, and their often dubious morals, and the majestic sublimity of their work which, despite its lowly origins, could speak the language of beauty and truth. 'Love the sinner, hate the sin' wasn't in vogue in Knox's fire and brimstone sermons. Scots were taught humanity was weak, fallen, and above all, never to be pitied by an angry God demanding vengeance. Art could not mediate the divine, or even reflect its atributes. And therefore it too, must be corrupted and ultimately without value.

Yet, Holloway postulates that it is precisely the overwhelming rejection of human comfort, beauty, and weakness by Scotland's established church which led to the development of a strong, counter-cultural literary movement - one which had many adherents in a population with few other outlets for imagining. It led to the Scottish enlightenment, to David Hume and Walter Scott, to a 'literate, argumentative nation that exalted words, and still does'.

What Scotland's great writers did, he feels, was make room for weakness, for comfort, for hope while still retaining the Reformation sense that life was destined to be miserable, difficult, and short. That is why so much of our literature, labeled 'miserabilist' by some, is in fact infused by the empathy which comes from those who are used to suffering, who know they have fallen, who have sympathy for the failings of others - of artists whose lives were often broken and difficult.

In this respect, he argues, the Reformation had misunderstood its own sacred texts. Jesus preached compassion and mercy, not fear and terror. Scottish literature was simply reclaiming the moral ground that the official religious authorities had squandered - and it was its compassion that made it morally valid.

To that extent, Holloway believes, art and the Bible share a common purpose: to explore the tension between good and evil, between despair and hope, that is an integral part of human existence and needs to be explained somehow, whether through poetry, myth, or sacred writing.
Although he believes personally that the Bible is a human creation which reflects the values and (often misogynist) expectations of its time, putting him at odds with more mainstream literalist Christians), he also argues that the overarching themes it addresses - the themes, after all of all great literature - are universal and relevant to all human beings.

As such, he says, it makes no difference whether ethics are explored in the Bible or any other artistic work. The important thing is not the origin, divine or otherwise, but its usefulness to making our lives, and the lives of others, as beautiful, just, and fair as they possibly can be.

To which all I can say is 'Amen to that".

Liberals: Doomed to Defections?

Has Liberalism lost its way? Certainly defections from the Lib Dem to Conservative Camp this week suggest something is amiss´at the heart of liberal democracy. But is the change of heart by Jean Pierre Cavada, chairman of the European Parliament's influential Civil Liberties Committe and Lib Dem Sajjad Karim, indicative of an ideological loss of confidence or simply the fear of electoral failure?

In the case of both men, the temptation to join forces with a revived conservatism just before the elections may simply have been too great. Certainly Saj Karim's distant second place on the Lib Dem list behind Chris Davies MEP was a sting that was hard to ignore. Harder still may be the brute electoral facts. At Lib Dem conference in Brighton his aides talked openly about the unlikelihood of having both men re-elected in 2009 when the party's share of the vote is expected to fall sharply. Cavada, fighting for a municipal seat in the 2nd arrondissement in Paris, clearly feels that Bayrou has lost his way and is putting his faith in the winning side.

But is this the same as idelogical disintegration, as Karim alleges? I think not. It is true that both the MODEM and Lib Dems have found it difficult to steer their parties' priorities of late, but that is due in large part to the opposing currents - and therefore factions - inherent in Liberalism rather than an ideological loss of nerve. Indeed, just as the Labour and Tory parties have undergone periods of introspection in recent years to resolve internal disputes over the place of market liberalisation or attitudes towards Europe, Liberals, who perhaps over-emphasised their unity over the last decade, now need to do the same with regards to the economic/social liberal divide.

Even then, I don't believe the gulf is as big as the media suggests. Huhne and Clegg's appearance on Question Time was memorable, if at all, for the remarkable similarity of their positions which led one viewer to ask 'How can we tell you apart'? The Calamity Clegg incident days later may have been bad publicity but it wasn't really based on policy divergence either, although you could argue that Huhne is the ideological leader and Clegg the follower. If this leadership contest is the sign of a party in ideological crisis, then what standards do we set for unity?

It may not be the best time for Liberals in Europe, with convergence to the centre by both socialists and conservatives squeezing our vote. But that does not mean we are an irrelevance. Our battles will be fought on the issues, the ideological issues, that the other parties neglect or tacitly consent on in their quest for electoral dominance. Whether it is the security state , abdication of human rights , euroscepticism, warmongering, scaremongering over immigrants, or nuclear rearmament beloved of left and right we will be there offering voters choice, where otherwise none would exist.

The Liberal Democrats, whatever their faults, have at their heart an ethos of internationalism, openness, environmental sustainability and respect for fundamental rights that the other parties, whatever their propaganda, simply do not share.

Save Denmark!!

Denmark. Used to make me think of happy blonde people, fairy tales, pig farms, mermaids, and yeah, I'll be honest, nude sunbathing. All in all the picture of a stable, tolerant European country. These days, it must be said, the reality is somewhat different. The first thing that might spring to mind is the Mohammed Cartoons, followed by the (rather inexplicable) ban on Danish exports, which - it must be said - made me a Defender of Denmark back in 2006.

However, the aftermath of the cartoons crisis suggested that the 'freedom of speech' mantle I had picked up wasn't entirely the true story. After all, Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper which ran the infamous cartoons had also commissioned them. It had done so as part of its self-chosen role at the forefront of right wing anti-immigrant media propaganda. It had been accused - prior to the cartoon furore´- of inciting racial hatred. It had promoted a toughening of Denmark's - already quite insane - immigration laws so that they would be in breach of European Human Rights legislation. Danes - perhaps not such innocent symbols of the tolerant European ideal after all.

However I hadn't quite lost all hope in this nation until last night. One of my best pals is Danish and had been contemplating loping back from Brussels to the wilds of Copenhagen of late. Until, that is, the Danish election campaign which she 'experienced' on her recent trip home. I should point out that this is about the blondest blue eyed Dane you could possibly imagine. But so strict is the measure of national conformism in Denmark these days that she was pretty much branded a foreigner: accent didn't sound quite right, lived in foreign parts, had failed to start a family early enough with another Dane...umm....its all a bit too kinder, kuche, kirche for my liking, with more than an inkling of national socialism about it. Imagine, therefore, how difficult life would be if you were called Aicha and weren't blonde... These campaign posters are very telling. The one on the left reads something like 'Immigrants should give, not just take, from Denmark" - a reference to the idea that they are all scroungers really.

Things get worse. The country is in the grip of extreme Euroscepticism and the radicalisation of politics, with a large and growing extreme right which - due to its support for Rasmussen's government over the last seven years - has been increasingly mainstreamed. Non-whites are essentially second class citizens, denied equal access to housing, welfare and job opportunities. The state has put in place rigid policies controlling who you marry, where you are allowed to reside, even your child's citizenship status.

In Denmark, if you are Danish and you marry a foreigner you aren't even allowed to live with your spouse in Denmark if it's possible for you to live in their country. Now I am sure it would be possible for me - in theory - to live all kinds of places from Kabul to Kazakstan. The question is, would i want to? would they be safe places to bring up my kids and raise a happy, secure family in - and this is important - the European culture to which I belong??? (Of course I am not Danish but you know what I mean - for my friend, for anyone, this is a fundamental consideration).

Technically this is against European law but the Danes don't give a monkeys. In fact, they are proud of their motto "We don't want to be a multicultural society".That's why there are villages of Danish exiles and their pariah foreign partners living across the water in Sweden and commuting to work in Copenhagen. It's true, there's something rotten in the state of Denmark and make no mistake

The Danish elections are tomorrow. It's a chance for the Danes to choose in favour of the moderate centre ground, and their representatives in the recently formed 'New Alliance Party'- Let's hope it is they, and not the Right Wing crazies who get to prop up 'liberal' Rasmussen's government next time around. And that the extreme right doesn't gain at the expense of openness, moderation, and fundamental rights.

It is extremely worrying when traditionally liberal countries like Denmark and the Netherlands become bastions of the right. For as we have seen in Belgium with the Vlaams Belang, once the extreme right gains a foothold they are extremely hard to dislodge and encourage the spread of such ideas right across the political spectrum in all EU nations. It is no surprise that Sarkozy toughened his policies to gain the trust of growing numbers of Le Pen supporters in France at the last elections. Let's just hope this tactic does not spread, or it could spread very bad news for all of us who love liberty and diversity.

In the meantime, if the Danes do vote in favour of the extreme right I suggest an extreme solution. Short of suspending EU membership, as we threatened to do with Jorg Hyder in Austria, individuals should act - perhaps, mirroring muslim outrage, a boycott is in order (er....here we go again...dont buy danish bacon!)

Airport Etiquette

Customs, as we know, vary from country to country. One very British custom is queuing. People like to joke that we will join a queue even if we don't know what we are actually queuing for, so strong is the emphasis on waiting your turn.

I'm no different. I'm an inveterate queuer and a stickler for politeness, generally speaking. But this isn't always true of Belgians. Here, you must always be on the look-out in case you lose your turn. Nothing can be taken for granted.

I made the mistake of letting my guard down while waiting at Zaventem airport last week. On arrival, tired and dazed after a week of hell in Strasbourg, I joined the back of the line while my friend went to get us a much-needed coffee. On returning ten or fifteen minutes later she commented that I hadn't moved very far in that time. Indeed, on turning round, I discovered I was still very much at the back of the line.

The only thing was, though, that some Indian guys who had walked past five minutes or so before were spearheading a new tributary to the queue which had started from the other direction. I was in a hurry. I hesitated - should I, shouldn't I? Then thought what the hell and went to reclaim my 'rightful' place just behind them.

It caused uproar. I was shouted down by a Flemish gentleman about my lack of manners, and a couple of angry ladies who claimed my action was thoroughly unscrupulous. I tried to explain, in French, that the people I was standing behind had clearly arrived later and that, in the freeforall, the main queue - mine - had effectively been sidelined. Useless. Or perhaps that was my language skills. After a few minutes I decided just to keep silent and stand my ground.

On nearing the partitions for the checkout desk I was surprised by a sharp jab in the ribs. A Belgian couple behind me were clearly squaring up for a fight and before I knew it the man had lifted my suitcase clear over his trolley while his wife took great delight in placing it firmly in the middle of the concourse, at the end of the line. He didnt mince his words either, demanding i 'bouge mon cul' and other equally unflattering remarks.

To reinforce the point his wife then took hold of the trolley and proceeded to run over my foot in an effort to evict me bodily. Realising it was just creating more of a scene her husband took over the reins and shoved me a good four or five metres with it as I protested loudly.

Finally an airport worker came over and threatened to throw them both out the queue. In some ways I had won the argument. But I was very confused and upset.

My question, I suppose, is who was in the right? I wouldn't have asserted myself if I didnt feel I had a point. But then, what seems right and wrong and what are right and wrong are very different. If everyone else felt I had committed a fault, should I have accepted that was just and backed down? Or was I right to stand up to this situation?

Terrified of running into my fellow passengers, I spent some time hovering around the security gate before ducking into the plane at the last possible second. On emerging with my bags in Delhi - without further run-ins - I presumed myself safe.

But bizarrely, I did run into that ferocious couple again, this time 50k or so from the Tibetan border on Shimla's main street. This time, my partner had skipped the queue and - not recognising them - I pointed out they had been waiting before us. I couldn't work out the cold reception at first nor their certainty that I must be 'Belgian' (my accent being a dead giveaway). Maybe that was karma completed for this trip...

The Future: A Workerless World?

Apparently Jeremy Rifkin, the professor famous for predicting a Third Industrial Revolution on the back of Green Technology, has made one other prediction that kept rather more under wraps by our leaders. In the technological heaven that is the 21st century, he suggests, there won't be much work for human beings left to do since many of us will be replaced by robots.

Indeed, although"The global economy has never been more productive worldwide, unemployment is at its highest since the Great Depression. Out of 124 million American jobs, 90 million are potentially vulnerable to replacement by machines."

Now, as someone who values my leisure time that seems pretty good news at first sight, as it does to Professor Rifkin. Yet like labour-saving devices, feted in the 50s for giving us more free time away from chores but which simply give us more time to work, it seems this change could seriously back-fire on the human race.

Why? Well let me copy and paste Bob Black's critique of this theory:

Problem Number One: No Work; No Money; Huge Underclass

"As Rifkin reveals, the tech-driven downsizing of the workforce spares no sector of the economy. In the United States, originally a country of farmers, only 2.7% of the population works in agriculture, and here -- and everywhere -- "the end of outdoor agriculture" is foreseeable. The industrial sector was next. And now the tertiary sector, which had grown relative to the others, which is now by far the largest sector, is getting pared down. Automatic teller machines replace bank tellers. Middle management is dramatically diminished: the bosses relay their orders to the production workers directly, by computer, and monitor their compliance by computer too.
We approach what Bill Gates calls "frictionless capitalism": direct transactions between producers and consumers. Capitalism will eliminate the mercantile middlemen who created it.

In Proletarian Heaven, the handloom weavers must be snickering. What's wrong with this picture? Fundamentally this: the commodities so abundantly produced in an almost workerless economy have to be sold, but in order to be sold, they must be bought, and in order for them to be bought, consumers require the money to pay for them. They get most of that money as wages for working. Even Rifkin, who goes to great lengths not to sound radical, grudgingly admits that a certain Karl Marx came up with this notion of a crisis of capitalist overproduction relative to purchasing power"

Problem Number 2: The Fewer Workers, the More Stress - Both For Those With Jobs and Those Without

"Today we work longer hours than we did in 1948, although productivity has since then more than doubled. Instead of reducing hours, employers are reducing their fulltime workforces, intensifying exploitation and insecurity, while simultaneously maximizing the use of throwaway temp workers, momentarily mobilized reservists with little job security and lots of stress.

The work of the remaining workers, the knowledge-workers, is immensely stressful. Like text on a computer screen, it scrolls around inexorably, but for every worker who can't take it, there's another in "the new reserve army" of the unemployed (another borrowing from you-know-who) desperate to take her place. And the redundant majority is not just an insufficient market, it's a reservoir of despair.

Not only are people going to be poor, they're going to know that they're useless. What happened to the first victims of automation -- southern blacks displaced by agricultural technology ending up as a permanent underclass -- will happen to many millions of whites too. We know the consequences: crime, drugs, family breakdown, social decay. Controlling or, more realistically, containing them will be costly and difficult"

The Way Forward:

Jeremy Rifkin thinks that the only way out of this nightmare is getting the semi and unemployed to be paid in return for voluntary service. Community work. Cleaning Streets. Clearing woodland. Whatever you want to call it it is far from sitting on a beach with a pina colada, enjoying the benefits of not working. In fact his solution bears more than a passing ressemblance to slavery. Bizarrely Jeremy Rifkin thinks this is a great solution because - what would people do if they didnt work??

It is clear that, in this case, the Protestant Spirit and Work Ethic are coalescing seemlessly. Ask people in other countries - Italy, for example, where everything always seems to be closed, or our Mexican fisherman from the previous post - how they would live without work and they would tell you straight away: focus on their personal priorities. Work is created so we can pursue these - not so we can ignore them and plough on in 15 hours a day. Some poor souls have the misfortune to have badly paying jobs. In the past, it was they who worked hard to survive. These days, city bankers are as likely to slave away all the hours God sends - just to have their two weeks of leisure per years, sitting by the beach with their blackberries on standby.

Bob Black has a better idea. Get rid of the control element which underlines such ideas. Let people work fewer hours, let them job share, to give more people a chance to earn. Then we might all be happier.

Vive la France, Vive la semaines des 35 heures!

http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/critique.html

But Shariasly

Two phrases that don't normally go together attracted my attention today: 'EPP Working Group' and 'Sharia in Europe'. But there it was, advertised on a poster in the main lobby as I dashed to a meeting of the - wait for it - Working Group on the Separation of Religion and Politics to discuss apostasy. What the bejeezus is going on?

Gone are the days when European Parliament debates ranged from the proper curve of cucumbers to distribution of structual funding in outlying regions of Greece. Religious issues are enjoying the kind of political currency in our corridors of power unheard of for most of the twentieth century. A fact which is used to further various political ends, bóth electoral and ideological.

Fearmongers from the left of the political spectrum warn of the retreat of secularism in Europe and the abandonment of our humanist heritage. Cultural relativism and weak defence of enlightenment values by government and the media, they claim, has resulted in the birth of new forms of totalitarianism whether in the guise of Islamic extremism or papish plots to ban abortion and demonise homosexuals.

For many MEPs, their aim - thinly veiled, if you'll excuse the pun - is to sideline the 'backward' forces of religion and promote their own aggressive brand of secular humanism. Abolition of religious education in schools, bans on religious symbols in public spaces, and an emphasis on civic ethics is their endgame, and one which exhibits as much exclusivity as your average religious fundamentalist.

On the other side of the bench, conservatives and ultra-nationalists point to the revival of 'Judeo-Christian ethics' - exemplified by the heated debate over the place of God in Europe's tentative Constitution and Polish attempts to put 'values' firmly back on the political agenda - as an example of the EU reclaiming its heritage from the mistakes of multiculturalism and liberal neutrality. In their version of reality immigration is responsible for the widely cited 'breakdown' in European society, providing a pretext to forcibly assimilate or deport non white citizens.

Both are allied against liberal apologists whose 'flabby' thinking is supposedly handing the field to Islamists prepared to misuse the discourse of human rights and religious freedoms to undermine the very values liberals seek to protect. In reality, of course, many critics of liberalism dislike the freedom from social conformity which is its corollary and are more than happy to seize on reasons for curtailing individual rights which they deem in opposition to necessary state control and surveillance.

In all versions, the demonised Muslim minority is used as a lever to force political change. So pervasive has the motif of mad mullahs on the streets of Europe become that the stereotype has been normalised - a fact which constitutes simply one more example of the mainstreaming of far-right policies in the political life of our continent which has taken on an increasingly xenophobic and nationalist streak.

Liberals, of course, are wrong not to condemn political islamists of the Hizb-ut-Tahrir persuasion and deserve all the pummelling they currently receive for lying down in the face of would be theocratic despots. Equally, their opponents are wrong to tar all Muslims with the same brush, By synthesising the programme of Political Islam with religion in the public mind, anyone who declares themselves to be a Muslim (whether Salafi, Reformist, or downright secular) is deemed a suspect, a traitor, and the antithesis of all things European.

Just yesterday two far-right politicians - Frank Vanhecke and Filip Dewinter of the Belgian Vlaams Belang - were arrested outside the European Commission for protesting against the Islamisation of Europe. Shouting 'No to Sharia Law' and 'Democracy Not Theocracy' supporters clashed with the police and bemused immigrants in the EU quarter of Brussels.

Their numbers may have been small - in the hundreds rather than thousands due to a ban on the grounds of maintaining public order issued by the mayor - but they hit the headlines big time. Not allowing them to demonstrate may prove a major mistake by the authorities as it rallied the supporters of free speech to the side of people who are fundamentally racist, misguided, or both.

What I saw in the parliament today did nothing to dissuade my fears for the future. It is time politicians and the media (who don't generally have strong theological backgrounds) started to put much greater distance between the jihadi rhetoric of extremist political groups and ordinary followers of the Islamic religion. Likewise, governments must have the guts to institute formal bans on all Islamist groups and their cover organisations which promote violence and undermine democracy. It is frankly outrageous that leading lights from organisations like the Hizb, having been expelled from Muslim countries, continue to enjoy the right to speak out against a Western way of life that they do not respect and in many cases wish to destroy. That way alone lies compromise and a return to a middle ground that too often seems to have been abandoned.

Of Pride and Prejudice

How can you spot a friendship is dying? Most of the time friends who exit our lives do so slowly, and in stages. You start seeing them less and less (rarely intentionally, and with the best intentions of rectifying the situation) until the fact that they have moved, or married, or got a new job, sinks in and they recede to the back of your facebook page. Such changes in our personal priorities are rarely painful. Indeed, they are rarely anyone's fault. Most likely, they come about naturally, and with assent on both sides.

Every so often, however, someone carves you out of their life with a decisiveness which is as startling as it is unexpected. The last time it really happened to me was at high school - with all the psychological brutality teenage girls normally reserve for one other. I remember the pain of it still: my best friend turning against me from one day to the next, and of spending about two years trying to work out why apologies and explanations hadn't ironed things out. I've also done the same to some others in my life - people who thought I was angry with them, and thus refused to communicate, when in reality I was just indifferent and wanted them to go away.

The fact of the matter is that sometimes we need to move on from certain people in our lives. Perhaps we have little in common; perhaps we have grown out of them; perhaps we simply don't like them; perhaps we need to prioritise; or perhaps our relationship is somehow inappropriate. That happens. We develop. However the real question - and the ethics, if you like - is how to go about making the separation. I still feel rather guilty after leaving an ex-boyfriend (who was always calling me 'as a friend') high and dry. Every so often I would agree to meet him for coffee and invariably, when the moment arrived, I would find a reason to cancel. I'm not surprised he hated me afterwards. I simply wasn't honest enough.

Nobody likes being rejected by someone they care for. Especially not by being given a chronic cold shoulder until they get the hint. Sometimes it is fairer to be cruel than to be kind, even if that is more difficult for the perpetrator. So many people take the attitude that if you ignore something it will go away. Very often, all that happens is that this breeds resentment and self-hatred in the injured party. Fundamentally, if you are indifferent to someone who cares for you, that does not mean to say you wish them ill. Just that you no longer wish to see them. As such, damaging someone's self-confidence for the sake of an easy way out is egotistical in the extreme. The 'its not you, its me' line might be cliched - but it saves a lot of worthless soulsearching in the long-run.

So much for responsibilities. What about rights? To what point can the injured party blame the other for their hurt feelings or sense of loss? And to what point are they entitled to an explanation? Personally, I think that if someone respects you enough to break ties with you, and tell you why - as is done in many breakups, if we're honest, which, however unpleasant at least have the relief of finality about them - you should respect them back and bother them no longer. However, if they refuse to confront the issue, or deny there is a problem, they do bear responsibility for that.

In that case, you can just tell them so, I suppose. And be done with it