Failure of multiculturalism? No, Failure of Government

There has been much talk about the apparent failure of multiculturalism, but little talk about the successes.

In Newport, where I have lived for 30 years, multiculturalism has long been a way of life, but that’s not to say it can’t be improved.

The media punishes us with scaremongering ideas of hoards of immigrants crossing the channel. Government is worse. It continually announces immigration figures as if they are a bad thing, yet government doesn’t have a firm idea of what the figures are. What we do know is that per head of population, Germany has twice as many immigrants, and welcomes them.

We also know that the UK is not a poor country. However, the distribution of wealth distorts the picture. In the UK wealth is concentrated into the hands of the very rich few. Conversely poverty among the rest is increasing. Immigrants are the traditional scapegoat for all our ills, and right now they are being wrongly blamed for this increasing poverty.

It is government policy which is creating inequality, not immigration. Migration is natural. In fact without the natural urge to move around, the first humans may not have left the East African rift valley 200,000 years ago.

The migration of culture is a slightly different matter. Its success depends on mutual understanding, and without this understanding tolerance is difficult. Yet we like to think we are a tolerant people.

When another state joins the EU, the resultant influx of people from another culture is inevitable. It is how we deal with it which counts. Fear of ‘the other’ manifests itself in several ways, but all too often the flames of fear are fanned by government and media alike. ‘They are taking our jobs.’ ‘They are using our healthcare’.

The blatant omission here is ‘Who are they?’

That is precisely where multiculturalism is being forced to fail.  People living in the UK have a right to know more about the people coming to join us. We need to know about their values, their religions, their ethnicity and education. We need to know their history and their politics. In short we need to understand our differences and our similarities. All this could be provided simply and cheaply through TV programmes and news items, newspaper articles and websites. Multiculturalism works. It always has. 

We do not have a failure of multiculturalism. We have a failure of government.

The Sterile Class

Throughout the ages, there have been references to the group of people who produce nothing, but take much. Today it is clear that we have this class of people – they make nothing at all, and indeed do it on borrowed money, or worse, non-existent money such as debt. They have huge salaries and even bigger bonuses. They are not penalised when they gamble billions away, and they do not go to jail when they defraud the public. In short, they are the bankers.

The Sterile Class was a term used by a group known as that Physiocrats in the letter part of the 18th Century, and never before has it resounded so clearly. We have a whole class of people who work in institutions deemed too big to fail and too wealthy to jail. They do nothing useful for society. They are sterile. They are a Sterile Class.

The old economic systems of China put merchants at the bottom of the class hierarchy, because they did not produce but only distributed goods made by others.

In the late Roman Republic, the dominant senatorial class was not allowed to engage in banking or commerce but relied on their large plantations for income.

The French school of Physiocracy has particular relevance today, because they saw quite clearly that all life remains dependent on the productivity of the raw soil and the ability of the natural environment to renew itself. They first used the term ‘the Sterile Class’ to illustrate the difference between the productive class – those who made or grew something useful – and those who did not.

In the past, banking did have a useful function: to lend money for increased production for example, but banking always had its unproductive side. Financing wars to prop up the egos of monarchy was very popular. It still is.

Islam forbids lending with interest even today, and the Torah states that all debts should be erased every 7 years and every 50 years (in the Jubilee year, as described in the Book of Leviticus). The majority of Muslims and Jews alike do not attend to this teaching.

There is a wonderful phrase in international legal thought– Odious Debt. Odious Debt is debt that is incurred by a regime for purposes that do not serve the interest of the state. Interestingly, these debts are considered to be personal debts of the regime that incurred them and not debts of the state. 

Compared to the size of our economy, Britain is now one of the most heavily indebted countries in the Western world. The real national debt is close to £4.8 trillion and rising. That is approximately £78,000 for every person in the UK, and more than 103.5% of GDP (Centre for Policy Studies).  We are servicing debts we will probably never pay back – well, not without raiding the savings of ordinary people.

Today, in the rise and completely predictable fall of banking we can see clearly that these institutions are less about useful productivity (they never were interested in funding for the greater good, even if profitable) and more about the creation of debt for debt’s sake. Debt has become the new money, it is unearned; it is sterile. Debt today, though accountable as wealth, is not wealth. Wealth, in real terms is the productivity of land and people.

We have a useless and toxic Sterile Class, and it is time to see them as such. They have gained far too much for doing far too little, they should take responsibility and start paying the bills.

A little bit about the birds and the bees....

Like it or not, we are all intrinsically connected to bees for our food security.  Their health and survival is our health and survival.

Bees, and other natural pollinators fertilize 90% of all we eat either directly through fruit and cereals, or indirectly via the mixed fodder which fattens the animals we eat. Bees, hoverflies, moths and bats are vital to the human food cycle.

But something bad is happening. Bees are dying. 

Bees are suffering from climate change and disease, but to halt the decline, there is something we can do right now: stop the use of pesticides.

The natural order of nature is being arrested by chemically treated seed, much of which is impregnated with pesticides before being sown. The pesticides enter every cell of the growing plant – leaves, flowers, pollen, roots – and the bees absorb these chemicals as they feed on the flower nectar.

The bees do not drop down dead instantly – that would be too easy to detect – but the pesticides, chiefly the neonicotoids , are a type of ‘nerve agent’ . The bees suffer brain damage similar to epilepsy. It is permanent.  They cannot find their way home, and they die.

Defra's chief scientist Dr Ian Boyd said, "Neonicotinoids will kill bees, let me be absolutely clear about that.”

Dr Christopher Connolly from Dundee University has produced the latest in a line of studies by British universities which prove that neonicotinoids are disastrous for bees. Research at Stirling University found they caused problems for queen bees. Then Newcastle University found they damaged bees' ability to learn – and, this has been fatal.

By 2050, we are going to have to feed 9.2 billion people – so in the next 50 years or so we are going to have to produce as much food as humanity has produced in our entire history.
UNFORTUNATELY THIS WILL NOT BE POSSIBLE IF WE DECIMATE OUR NATURAL POLLINATORS WITH PESTICIDES

85% of our queen bees have been lost already; beekeepers are reporting alarming colony declines, The UK is importing hundreds of thousands of bees every year to pollinate our fruit and crops. This is the very loud ring of an alarm bell telling us all to wake up!

And it’s not just about the bees, its about the birds too – and all flowers and wildlife in the interdependent ecosystem on which humans totally rely.  Between 1970 and 2010 in the UK, farmland birds dropped in alarming numbers. Turtle doves declined by 93 per cent, and will sadly soon be extinct; grey partridges by 91 per cent; corn buntings by 90 per cent; skylarks by 58 per cent. The sights and sounds of the countryside today are but a pale echo of the past.

The biggest problem we have is the Goliath pesticide industry, which is using strong-arm tactics to push its arguments in favour of the use of neonicotinoid pesticides. But the evidence is clear: the natural abundance of, bees, butterflies, moths and birds is in a terrible spiral of decline.
Alternatives to pesticides exist. It is possible to farm without neonicotinoids. Environmentally-friendly farming involving simple techniques such as crop rotation do not require the use of chemical pesticides.

Farmers need to urgently change their methods, and this will take time.  In the meantime, small gardens will be the lifeline to bees this year, so please make sure you don’t use any chemicals in yours.

Warriors of the Pacific Islands Fight Climate Change

Today I am posting in full a letter from  Mikaele Maiava, who is writing from the Pacific Island archipelago of Tokelau. This is worth reading in full because of the courage and determination a small Pacific island is showing in the face of climate change forced on them by the energy greedy nations of the world.

"Last October, Tokelau turned off the last of its diesel generators. In their place, we switched on our solar plants, making Tokelau the first country in the world to become 100% renewably-powered.

I woke up before sunrise that day, excited about the history Tokelau was making. My whole village made its way to the site of over 100 solar panels -- we could see the many hours of hard labor that had gone into this project. As we counted down to the switch, I could feel future generations smiling at us and thanking us. Our children's future suddenly looked brighter because we had the vision (and perseverance) necessary to get off fossil fuels and switch to 100% renewable energy.

You might wonder why we bothered. Aren't we doomed to lose our islands from sea-level rise? I don't blame you for thinking that if you did. So often the global media victimises the Pacific Islands and portrays us as helplessly succumbing to climate change and rising seas. But the global media know nothing of who we really are, or how it feels to live on these paradise islands we call home. They don't know that as Pacific Islanders, we are warriors, and that the land we live on is part of us.

We know that the longer the fossil fuel industry gets its way, the worse climate change will be, and the more sea-level rise will threaten our islands. But giving up on our home is not an option. We are not drowning.
We are fighting.

That's why on March 2nd, Pacific Islanders across 15 diverse nations will be mobilising at prominent locations to perform our unique war challenges, songs, and dances. We'll be laying down a challenge to the fossil fuel industry. It is their coal and oil and gas vs. our future. They cannot both coexist. And it is our future that has to win.

In this moment, and in the years to come, we need you to walk beside us. Because we live far away from the mines and power plants that threaten our future, we need the world's solidarity. Click here to stand with us during this weekend of Pacific Warrior climate action!

We want to show the world that people from countries and cultures everywhere are standing with us -- the Pacific Warriors -- in the fight against climate change.

Fakafetai lahi,
Thank you,
Mikaele Maiava"