Rolled-up Trousers

My Sunday Herald piece on the papal visit

For me, the open air mass was a fascinating window into the Catholic Church. One sees Muslims regularly being ‘holy’ on the television, in prostration during prayer or at pilgrimage in Makkah. But it’s not often you see ordinary Catholics engaged in prayer or observing rituals as we did in Bellahouston Park. In its ritualism, it was very similar to what I’m used to as a Muslim. Men dressed in long robes, wearing hats and speaking in foreign languages. Just the beards were missing.

Baroness Warsi accused the previous Labour government of treating religion as something that foreigners do, but it’s not often that you see white folks engaging in the sacred in public. Maybe that is something to do with our culture of secularism, aggressive or otherwise, that means you don’t do God outside your home or church.

A recurring theme of the Papal visit has been the apparent tension between faith and our secular society. What is frustrating is how the meaning of secularism is constantly confused. What it doesn’t mean is that people of faith cannot contribute to public debate. Ideas and opinions are valid and up for public acceptance or rejection on merit, no matter what their genesis is.

Having established the right of faiths to be at the table, I have to disagree with the views often expressed when there. There is a preoccupation with sexual issues - contraception, abortion and “the gays”. These arguments aren’t new and have been raging since biblical times. When people of faith lead on them though, they appear harsh and hardhearted.

I often have this out with Muslims, that the very same rights that let us practice our faith must be upheld for homosexuals to live as they wish. What's good for the goose and all that. Muslims should not be guilting people about a moral code they do not accept. I cite the example of how in Islam the consumption of alcohol is forbidden. This wasn’t revealed on Day One though, and came much later once followers’ hearts were attuned to God and they would willingly accept such strictures. The focus of faith should then be on winning hearts through mercy and messages of hope. All the major faiths are struggling for language on this, despite the fact that many, many people are looking for spirituality in an age of materialism. Again, this is not a new dichotomy in the thousands of years or religious history.

The long game matters to the Catholic church and any organisation that can invoke successes from hundreds of years ago as the pope did with the set up of Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrew's Universities is looking at things over the serious long term. What was disappointing though was the lack of a new idea. In Glasgow, there was no mention of the financial crisis, climate change, global wars or poverty. What is today's version of setting up the ancient universities that we'll be talking about in 500 years time?

Call me Friar Tuck

Alternatives to the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition's cuts agenda emerge all the time. The IMF of all people have backed the idea of a "Robin Hood Tax" on financial transactions.

This hasn't been widely reported, and instead we get the usual stream of lurid headlines about public spending cuts. I'm not sure if the IMF's plans are strictly along the lines of the RHT campaign given that this calls for the money to be used specifically to tackle poverty and climate change at home and abroad.

Still, using the money to bolster public investment would be infinitely better than the reverse Robin Hood syndrome the UK government is currently implementing. Their plans will hit the poorest hardest.

As well as the £20bn that the RHT would raise, Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK has demonstrated the same amount could be brought in though a bit work to chip at the tax gap that exists. Instead, the Tories and Lib Dems are cutting HMRC operations too.

Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander will say that he announced extra money for tax collection this week. However, this is less than the amount that is to be cut from this work.

The coalition government have got no right to be instigating losses of jobs and essential services without having made any serious effort to get the income levels up. This is after all what has increased the deficit in the first place. They have no plan for growth, and any time new money is identified such as the £7bn they say they are going to raise through better tax collection, or through better than expected growth figures for the last few months, the news is not accompanied by good news of less cuts. That's what makes the spending vandalism ideological, and not necessary.

Instead we are treated to constant infantile similitudes with tightening household spending, which Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg treated us to again yesterday in his conference speech. Family finances are nothing like those of a state, but if we take Clegg's comparison, he is about to make members of his own family jobless and hungry in a wanton act of domestic violence.

Other toilet rolls are available

Taken at my local supermarket. My review: Doesn't provide adequate cleansing owing to evident prior use by bulls.

True Criminal

Taken from my phone as part of the movement placing Tony Blair's memoirs in the crime section of bookshops.

I note that his book was 'half price' as soon as it hit the shelves. Surely that makes it 'the price'. Will the spinning ever stop?

Iraq: 1 million dead, 5 million refugees and 3 trillion dollars later, what was that all about?

The US declared combat operations in Iraq at an end this week. Given the lack of confetti, streamers and "Mission Accomplished" banners, it's difficult to conclude that even they do not see the war as anything other than a failure.

It has been a war of paradoxes. Tony Blair took the release of his Weapons of Mass Distraction in the form of his memoirs this week to again restate his belief that the greater freedoms that Iraq now has outweigh the deaths and the collapse in security since 2003.

This is at odds with the way he conducted himself as prime minister at home, where he routinely curtailed freedoms in the name of security, with a raft of "game changing" initiatives such as 90 days detention and control orders. This was to counter the terror threat he himself ramped up with his Iraq war.

When Blair spoke to Andrew Marr on Wednesday, he trotted out the line that he used a month before war at the Labour Party conference in Glasgow the same day two million of us were protesting outside and in London:

If there are 500,000 on the march, that is still less than the number of people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for. If there are one million, that is still less than the number of people who died in the wars he started.

Blair repeated these figures this week and said Saddam may have killed this number in the last seven years had he been in power. Even if this did end up happening, the point is that the UK wouldn't have done it. Surely your own direct culpability matters. We don't stop a mass murderer by carrying out his deeds for him. That doesn't count. You can't accuse Saddam of having used chemical weapons on his own people, and somehow make out that it's better that we did it for him.

Another paradox. Iraqis have used their freedom to elect what Blair and his neocon allies have railed against for the last decade - an Islamist regime called the Islamic Dawa Party that recognises the sovereignty of Allah, elected under a constitution that has Islam as a "fundamental source of legislation". This is what Blair had British troops lay their lives down for while the pro-war brigade played games to the media here against contrived "radical Islamic" influences. While looking for Islamists under the bed at home, they had jumped into bed with them elsewhere.

To return to the main theme, there isn't an overall rationale for withdrawal at this juncture. The current situation could just as easily have been cited as a reason to continue. This serves as a pointer to Afghanistan. The facts are still being fixed round the policy, which right now is that our troops will remain there. In Afghanistan we'll get the same end result as Iraq. An arbitrary moment for withdrawal leaving us all wondering what it had all been for.