As a Democratic administration and Congress threaten to turn America into a welfare state on the disastrous European model, this interview from Front Page Magazine is worth noting. 

Jamie Glazov interviews Martin Durkin.

Durkin: To most people, I imagine, welfare seems an obviously good thing. But in fact the corrosive and iniquitous side of welfare has been evident for many decades. It’s only now that people are poking their heads out of the trench and daring to say so. You can see the devastating effects of welfare in Britain, for example, in the exponential rise in single motherhood. The figures are astonishing. In the 1950s almost all children in Britain were brought up by their natural parents. Today, only around half the children in Britain are brought up by their natural parents. Half!

FP: Why has that happened? 

Durkin: To see why that happened, let me paint you a picture. In the 1950s, the typical working man and his wife In Britain lived in an income-tax free existence. They kept every penny they earned. For an unmarried teenager, there was no council flat (the ‘projects’ I think you call them), no rent rebate, no rate rebate, no housing benefit or anything else. The burden of looking after her and the child fell on her family, friends or charity. Parents who discovered their daughters were pregnant were understandably furious – because they had to pick up the tab. That’s why Dad stomped round to the family of the boy responsible, to call him to account. They boy’s family understood the full economic implications of making babies and came down on him like a ton of bricks. From the real economic relationships there arose a real moral code – the value and the cost of things were clear. The growth of welfare benefits has been huge since that time. And within that system a pregnant girl gets special treatment (top of the state housing list etc). The fear has gone. The old idea, “Don’t, for heaven’s sake, get pregnant. It would be a disaster” has gone. For many girls, getting pregnant is a ticket to get out of the parental home. This has been the subject of detailed studies. A ten percent increase in benefits, one of them finds, tends to increase the prevalence of single mothers by 17 percent.

FP: How has the Left played a role in this development?

Durkin: This whole trend in social policy was fuelled by the anti-family views of the left. The family was bourgeois. Divorce was even celebrated (at least among the serious Left and among tougher feminists). I suppose they thought they were doing young girls a favor. If they did, they were fatted-headed idiots. The effect is disastrous for all those involved. The levels of depression, violence and criminality among lone parents (and their wayward children and transient partners) is heartbreaking. As one commentator puts it, “The evidence that lone parents – and indeed those who cohabit – are very more likely to be victims of violence is worldwide, consistent and overwhelming.” In Britain single parents are about 20 times more likely to suffer domestic violence. A child of a single parent is 15 times more likely to be abused than a child brought up by two natural parents. A child brought up by their natural mother and a cohabite (non natural father) is at even greater risk – 19 times more likely to suffer violence and 74 times more likely to be killed. It’s awful. To catalogue in detail the full devastating effects of welfare – also for example the crippling effects on men who are out of work – would take ages.

 FP: Ok, but tell us some more negative effects.

 Durkin: Overall, I think in general the bigger evil effects of welfare have been enormously underestimated, even by commentators who regard themselves as more pro-capitalist in their sympathies. Welfare is the basic cause of the deleterious cultural changes we have witnessed in the West over the past 60 years. The Welfare State, pioneered in Britain of course, has corrupted this country to its core. It has transformed the country caricatured by Noel Coward and others – essentially pretty decent, self-reliant, and plucky – into a country which is thuggish, selfish, mindless, dispirited and lost. Gone is the British stiff upper lip. Modern Britons are moaning, self-pitying inadequates. The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-addled criminals and ne’er-do-wells. It has also, incidentally, burdened what was once the world’s biggest, most dynamic economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly expensive state machine. I’m sorry to sound cross about this, but I don’t think people fully realise what’s happened. Britain has, I think, the highest crime rate of any industrialised country in the world. It is twice as high as the US. The violent crime rate is higher in London than New York. Britain has the highest rate of drug abuse, the highest teenage pregnancy rate and the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease in the modern industrial world. What the hell happened?

FP: So what the hell happened? 

Durkin: The logic is inescapable. Each slice of do-gooder social policy has had its own tragic, unintended effects. The weight and quality of evidence leaves no room for doubt. The Welfare State has been an unremitting disaster, beyond any hope of reform. It is not that the welfare state isn’t functioning properly, it is that the welfare state is in essence degrading. In the US, I think much the same can be said of the effects of welfare on the black community. How did we get from the nobility of Martin Luther King, to the sordid, gun-toting, rantings of the gangster rappers? Does the Left imagine that this represents liberation? Larry Elder and others have no doubt what’s to blame. The story goes back to Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which had people going door to door, encouraging people to get on welfare. Now, I understand, nearly 70 percent of today’s black children are born out of wedlock. It can be demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that the modern ‘cultural trends’ which we lament have an economic cause, and are a direct result of state intervention. The Left do not see economic necessity as a proper reflection of actual human relationships, but some capitalist carbuncle. It’s clear now that in removing economic necessity from people’s lives (which is what welfare does), we risk sinking into barbarism.

If this is true, Britain should now be regarded - and treated - as a terrorist-supporting country:

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a tottering terrorist group nearing its military collapse in Sri Lanka will defy UK anti-terrorism laws to glorify its suicide terrorism publicly when it holds its ‘suicide bombers day’ at the London Excel Centre, according to pro-LTTE media reports. Despite the proscription of the group in the United Kingdom , the Tamil language radio station, International Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) said in its broadcasts that the event would take place at the London ExCeL Centre, November 27 from 10a.m.

  Read more about it here.

 Britain has been hit by economic crisis from the same causes as the US. The world’s anti-free-marketeers, Communists, Socialists, European haters of the Anglo-Saxon world, and a multitude of left-wing churchmen are gloating, calling the meltdown a ‘crisis of capitalism’.

Madeleine Westrop comments:

I know you are Atheist Conservatives: so, if you have any interest in your diametric (or dialectic?) opposite, consider for a moment the Church of England. It is advocating Karl Marx.

I don’t mean that the whole ecclesiastical edifice is daubed in Hegelian anti-God revolutionary anti-Capitalist slogans.  Most of the Anglicans I know are constitutionally unable to talk about politics, religion, money or even ideas at an English dinner party.   (I suppose if Marx had bred dogs or polyanthus…) Our dear old Anglican aunts go to the pretty parish church every Sunday and are true blue Conservatives from their charming hats to their patent shoes. 

But look further up.  Turn your gaze from the modest and crumbly foundations to the airy spires above.   The astonishing thing is that the Archbishop of Canterbury, the most senior figure in the Established Church, turns to Marx when the world is troubled.

An article in the Spectator this week was written by The Most Reverend and Right Honorable, his Grace Dr Rowan Williams, Primate of All England, Lord Spiritual in the House of Lords, overseer of the Anglican Communion (the third largest denomination in the world), Ordinary to the Chaplains in the Army, Navy and Royal Airforce, Visitor, Patron and Governor to hundreds of charitable trusts, President of the House of Bishops and the General Synod, Chairman of the Archbishop’s Council, Church Commissioner responsible for administration of the wealth and property of the Church (about £6 billion and hundreds of acres of land), resident and official host to many at Lambeth Palace, resident of the Old Palace at Canterbury, bishop of the Diocese of Canterbury, blesser of oils, annointer of the Monarch at each coronation.  I have counted how many have been enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury and I think Dr Williams is about the 109th, since the first, St Augustine in 597 AD.

Dr Williams has decided to write about the economic crisis afflicting the world wholesale money markets, the banks and the stock-markets and ruination of all our pensions and savings to boot.  He says that unimaginable wealth has been generated by fiction and paper with no concrete outcome beyond profit for the traders.  He says the challenge is now to connect money to material reality.  And then it comes: “Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves.”  He reminds us that “ascribing reality to what you have in fact made yourself” is idolatry. 

I agree there has been an “unreality” exposed because those debt obligations turned out to be worthless.  But this was not the work of a Monster Capitalist system.  Exposure is just what happens when you find out you have been stupid enough to deal in rotten wheat or quack medicine.  And there has been “unreality” in thinking such prodigal borrowing and spending was sustainable.  Again, this is not Monster Capitalism at work, but simply old fashioned bad business practice.

Was Dr Williams  thinking of the sorcerer in Marx’s Communist Manifesto?  In 1848 Marx and Engels wrote:

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. 

This is nuts. Dr Williams can’t just say the problem is that we have created a Capitalist Monster and idolised it. For a start, here in England the problems have not occurred where old-fashioned capitalist values have prevailed.  The Northern Rock Bank lent out 110% mortgages to people who couldn’t make repayments and the bank went bust.  The taxpayer now has to pay a Bishop’s ransom for this failure. But Northern Rock was not a single-minded profit-mad selfish Capitalist Monster.  If it had been a bit more selfish it might have been more prudent. It gives 5% of its profits to ‘tackle disadvantage’ in the North East of England through a charitable foundation. It was a Labour Party pet and it was lending improvidently while the Labour Government was also borrowing like crazy to fund its socialist “transformations” (spending).  Northern Rock shared basic Labour Party socialist values. The bank employed Deborah Mattinson, Gordon Brown’s focus group guru, to advise it about social responsibility.  The Northern Rock charity gave money to the left wing think-tank the IPPR, which the Labour Government has used to outsource its own policy making.  In fact 17 departments have outsourced to the IPPR over the last 10 years.  And the inclusion and acceptance of the market system in a movement for social justice was part of the plan set out in Tony Blair’s New Labour movement.

Dr Williams also accepts private enterprise to some extent.  He writes,

“Of course business is not philanthropy, securing profit is a legitimate (if not a morally supreme) motivation for people…It’s true as well that, in some circumstances, loosening up a financial regime to allow for entrepreneurs and innovators to create wealth is necessary …But it is a sort of fundamentalism to say that this alone will secure stable and just outcomes everywhere.”

Which brings me to the second reason that the Shelleyesque Capitalist Monster, or the ungovernable sorcerer’s powers, are both inappropriate ideas.  Securing profit is a morally supreme motivation.  And while it is true that profit may not alone secure stable outcomes, the waste of wealth always produces unstable outcomes. True wealth (as contrasted with inflated speculative bubbles of paper wealth) is a sine qua non of stability, along with peace, the rule of law and liberty.

The problem is that Dr Williams has chosen a scoundrel unemployed insolvent misanthropist who sponged off his dying father and friends and couldn’t afford to bury his own child, for his lessons in morals and economics.  He chose Marx.  Instead he should have chosen a prudent, kindly, careful man who worked hard and made a meticulous study of how the wealth of nations can be increased and warned us against the very problems that have arisen in our economies: Adam Smith.  (It seems hardly worth mentioning in this Atheistic context, but it strikes me that an Archbishop might also have taken advice from Smith who believed, at least, in ‘a beneficent Providence’ over the anti-Religious Marx.)

Moreover, Marxism doesn’t really help to explain our predicament. The Communist Manifesto says that economic crises occur because of over-production:

“It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly…. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”

But but but! Our present ills arise because we have unrealistically overestimated our wealth.  Dr Williams pointed this out himself.  We are not in trouble because of over-production!  It is truer to say that we have spent more than is justified by what we have produced.  National debt in the United Kingdom is high: the Government says it is about £650 billion but if you add in the hidden debt obligations – Northern Rock, public sector pensions, Public-Private partnership commitments, decommissioning of power stations – the figure is at least doubled.  In other words, to claim the official figure for debt,  about 37% of our gross domestic product, is to make a wild underestimate.  And where Government led, we followed.  Personal debt amounts to about £1.4 trillion.  Adam Smith would not have approved:

Whatever we may imagine the real wealth and revenue of a country to consist in, whether in the value of the annual produce of its land and labour, as plain reason seems to dictate; or in the quantity of the precious metals… in either view of the matter, every prodigal appears to be a public enemy and every frugal man a public benefactor. 

It is true that the economic crisis has been made worse by the obscurity of the real state of things. But how like a priest to say that the problem is, in the end, idolatry of an unknowable, ineffable dark thing.  We should shine light on the problem rather than condemn it to the shadows. Obscurity and superstition is our enemy here. 

Take the South Sea Bubble problem of three hundred years ago. The south Sea Company bought a monopoly of trade with South America.  The company underwrote the National Debt for interest Payments from the Treasury. This all seemed rosy. Share prices soared and other companies were founded in a frenzy of speculation. People had no idea what they were buying or risking: for example, one to fire square canon balls, and one just for an unknown undertaking of ‘great advantage’. Ladies’ maids and porters bought carriages on supposed mountains of wealth. When the value of the stocks crashed, investors were made destitute overnight and suicides and arrests followed.  Isaac Newton lost money and said “I can calculate the movement of stars but not the madness of men.”   

Smith discusses, years later, the South Sea company itself in The Wealth of Nations:

The directors of such [joint stock] companies, however, being managers rather of other people’s money than their own; it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private company frequently watch over their own. Like the stewards of a rich man, they are apt to consider attention to small matters as not for their master’s honour, and very easily give themselves a dispensation from having it.  Negligence and profusion must always prevail… in the management of the affairs of such a company.  

How apt this basic analysis seems today.  Risk takers must be responsible and face moral hazard. And responsibility, like charity, is best applied close to home.  England has had some marvellous institutions, the building societies, owned by their depositors whose only purpose was to provide finance for buying houses.  They were prudent and profitable, on the whole and allowed multitudes to buy their own house by slow and careful saving.  However, in the last twenty years or so they have ‘de-mutualized’ and become publicly owned banks, dealing in the wholesale markets and lending to the inflated ‘buy to let’ investment market.  Since they have stopped being owned by their depositors, many have had disastrous losses and only this week, the biggest ‘buy to let’ lender, the Bradford and Bingley bank (building society that was) has been nationalised.

There is no Monster. In fact there is no capitalist system. There are frugal habits that build wealth and wasteful or irresponsible habits that destroy it.  It is terribly dangerous to condemn the market for failings in ourselves and our Governments.   When you go to bed tonight, you might look under the bed: pessimists might check on a hoard of gold coins rather than trust banks; Marxist revolutionaries might simply turn in; but let us hope only the Prelates  are looking for Monsters.  

  

 Little Green Footballs reports:

ISLAMIC law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence. Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court. Previously, the rulings of sharia courts in Britain could not be enforced, and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims.

It has now emerged that sharia courts with these powers have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester with the network’s headquarters in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. Two more courts are being planned for Glasgow and Edinburgh.

To the Muslim women of Britain we say: Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

 From an article in Front Page Magazine:

It’s no coincidence that Muslims constitute a substantial portion of the Labour Party’s electoral support in London and in much of its heartland in northern England.  In the expected close election for Parliament that will be held by mid-2010, an increasing Muslim population may be the difference between victory and defeat for the Labourites.

But Labour’s bien pensant hardly needs convincing.  Like most on the left today, they fancy themselves champions of the underdog and the oppressed, and sympathy for Islam, and Arab and Muslim causes fits neatly into their intellectual program.  Along with America and Israel-bashing, it goes to the very heart of how liberals view themselves and, more important, how they wish to be viewed by others.  It supplies them with the appearance of a self-abnegation that is supposed to relieve their Western, middle-class guilt with a cleansing humility but is nothing but moral exhibitionism; and, as always, involves other people’s money, other people’s freedom, and other people’s comfort – never or very rarely their own.

A classic of political correctness run amok, wonderful as a burlesque if it weren’t slowly undermining Britain’s way of life and its will to oppose extreme Islamism. 

Worse is that acceding to this nonsense gives Islamofascists confidence that they are on the winning side of history. That if they just shout a little louder and push a little harder, they may expect more of the same that becomes increasingly normative until it convinces the longer-settled among the UK’s population that they have no power to stop, let alone reverse, the process.

Read the whole article here.   

The following is from a report and commentary you can read here.

 Iraqi Terrorist and former leader of the fanatic Mehdi army, Ahmed Al-Fartoosi, responsible for the deaths of dozens of British soldiers is suing the British Ministry of Defence —why?? – because someone left pornography near a toilet that Al-Fartoosi used.

How ironic that a man who apparently had no problems with killing dozens if not more people should scream like a baby over his "virgin" eyes looking at nude pictures is cause for a lawsuit.  But then again - did anyone force open Ahmeds eyes and make him look at the porn?? Obviously not. Thus if he looked at it - he did so voluntarily. Nevertheless, the mere presence of the likely magazine is enough for this brave muslim to put his hand out to receive compensation for his "discomfort".

The other "egregious" offences committed against Fartoosi for which he wants the British taxpayers to provide free legal aid so that he can in essence…………sue the British taxpayers are:

HEARING porn videos being played on a soldier’s laptop;

 

BUMPING his arm and thigh when being put in an armoured vehicle; and

 

LOSING sleep in his cell due to noise and lights from a corridor.

No formal complaints were ever logged regarding the above incidents leading one to surmise that the above "horrific events" were not upsetting UNTIL Fartoosi and Attorney Phil Shiner met.  Far too often, a dhimmi lawyer, such as Phil Shiner, is waiting in the wings and ready to dip his hands into the British taxpayers pockets so that, in this instance, he can also self-righteously pretend to protest a war that he says he disagrees with and also manage to greatly enrich his bank account in the process. (Shiner has a past history of profiting off of legal aid money to defend Iraqi insurgents.)

Thus Fartoosi, via Shiner, is suing for false imprisonment and violations of new European human rights laws. Many feel that the EU human rights laws encourage terrorists to come to Britain. The EU human rights laws are consistently far more favorable to terrorists, murderers and rapists then to the victim so much so that a prominent British newspaper has started a movement to end the travesty that has been brought by these laws:

"The whole concept of “human rights” in Britain has become a travesty under which the interests of killers, rapists and paedophiles are placed above those of their victims."

 The British police cave again to outrageous Muslim demands. Now their dogs must wear socks. 

Read about it here. 

Who is it that orders the police to grovel like this? Is it Britain’s clueless Home Secretary? Or is it the unbelievably weak Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair?

 He wants it to be applicable in certain areas, namely financial dealings and marriage. Sharia marriage law permits polygamy, child marriage, and easy divorce for husbands only - all against British law. 

A shadow cabinet member (Conservative!) thinks he’s right, but wants one law to govern everybody. So does she mean that sharia should be the law of Britain in its entirety?

Find the puzzle at the end of this report. 

 The almost incredible weakness of the British authorities - in this case the police - when confronted by protest from Muslims is illustrated yet again here.

 I greatly admire Melanie Phillips, the author of this article.

I agree with her on almost everything (not religion). But I think she is being too kind to the British judges and politicians who release terrorists and allow them to be supported by the tax-payer.  She believes they act as they do because they cannot believe that some people have evil intentions. 

I, on the contrary, think that many British judges and politicians, and most lefty intellectuals fully understand the evil motives of Islamic mass-murderers, and are on their side.