Nooooooooo...

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I stopped listening to Pat Condell when he started going off on his BNP/anti-Muslim rants...
why is Britain more vulnerable than America to this? Is it because we're still largely theocrats, or because we have a legal separation of church and state? Or some combination of the two?

If you listened to Pat Condell, you'd realise that he hates religion - all religion. The Religion of Peace is the biggest threat to Europe at the moment, but Christianity ravaged this continent for thousands of years. We've only just put a stop to it. He isn't that keen on religious Jews who act the prat or Christian demagogues, or in fact anyone that threatens secular, liberal democracy or tries to force their beliefs on him or tries to threaten people into accepting their views.

For what it's worth, Condell is a supporter of UKIP. He hates the BNP with a passion. His enemy isn't racial - it's religious intolerance (with 'atheist' intolerance also getting a mention). He's also anti-EU.

I started listening to him because of his gleeful atheism. I stopped because, it seemed to me, he started to veer from bashing religion to bashing Muslims. I stand corrected wrt. the parties.

And, while I thought he was being paranoid about the anti-EU thing (that was also coming up at about the time I stopped listening - elections were coming up, and his posts started being pretty political), I have to say now that he was correct about it. England's lucky not to be sewn into that whole mess.

He's not bashing Muslims as such - he's bashing the behaviour that is endorsed by their religion. If you lived in Britain, you might understand why he's being so negative about this. Muslims in the U.S. are probably far more secular and willing to integrate than those in Europe.



He's one of our own - I'm in UKIP too. He's on the libertarian wing.



I think you're rather wrong about this. We remain in the EU and we have bailed out Eurozone countries (especially Greece and Italy, where the EU has deposed the elected governments of these countries and have installed their placemen amid severe austerity measures) even though we're not in the Eurozone!

I thought that the EU and the eurozone were synonymous, sorry. Guess I should start tuning into the BBC more often. What I meant above was that (If I understand it correctly) your currency isn't directly tied to the euro - so you might suffer due to trade issues and bank ties, but your own currency won't inflate or deflate with the euro - although given how much I've alread misunderstood or misremembered, I won't be surprised if that's wrong too.

Wrt. Condell, I do think he started to get a little personal at times, sort of a 'you have to be stupid and/or evil to follow this religion.'

Wrt. British politics, is there any movement at all to just get all religion out of politics/not grant religions any political power? One hears a little about the BNP on occasion, but I don't know much about anything else over there besides the Labor party (Labour?) and the Conservatives. I couldn't tell anyone what even those parties were with respect to pretty much any issue, either.
I've heard about a home care nurse who was fired for wearing a cross on her visits (and possibly proselytising at a patient).

puddingmouse, any input for a clueless colonial?

We have an established Church in this country. There are pressure groups like that Richard Dawkins one that try to rectify that, but both of the main political parties have no secular agenda. Labour encouraged the establishment of faith school on a massive scale during their last term (the Labour movement in Britain was started by liberal Christians, anyway). David Cameron has said that the UK is a 'Christian country'. I am fairly outspoken against faith schools myself. This is a result of going to Catholic school and being taught all the doctrine as if it was fact at a very young age (people say, 'what do you expect at a Catholic school'? - but why should we expect children to be subjected to that stuff? Especially, when in the case of some areas in this country, educational choices are limited and faith school is one of very few dire options). Also, sex education was very minimal and mostly centred around abstinence. That is dangerous. I'm sure even more dangerous things happen in Islamic schools. Even if it's just not really learning English. I once taught a woman who had been educated in an Islamic school, and whilst very intelligent, was behind in language because the instruction was often in Urdu or Arabic.

Labour and Conservatives dominate the political scene in this country because we have an FPTP voting system, like you do. They are the only parties you need to know much about, apart from the EU elections, where a different voting system is used and douches like Nick Griffin can get seats. Labour and Conservatives are quite similar, really. It's just that the Labour party is the lesser of two evils. The Conservative party is less social conservative that the US Republicans and has no interest in restricting access to abortions and the like. It has a social conservative wing, but they are just that - conservative with a small 'c'. Their main concern on that corner is not legalising drugs and not curbing the powers of the monarch (and ensuring people can hunt foxes). The Conservatives in this country are very fiscally neoliberal since the Thatcher years. They were even talking about privatising roads and they are basically privatising the health service in a much faster, more overt way than the Labour party did. The Labour party are much more fiscally neoliberal than they used to be and have contracted out government services to private organisations, but they are still essentially a social democratic party at heart. If they mess with the welfare state too much, they get a big backlash from their core support.

The third party, the Liberal Democrats, are just wasters who'll say anything to get elected. They are currently acting as the Conservative parties lapdogs in a 'coalition' government. They had a lot of the Muslim vote for a while during the height of the Iraq war (which they made a big deal about opposing). They also have a lot of support from LGBT groups - for some reason. I think it's because half of the Lib Dem party membership seems to be bisexual. I know this from being a Lib Dem-supporting member of an LGBT group as a student. I have learned the error of my ways.

<sigh>
After this thread, I feel less bad about being an American.

I don't think anyone should feel bad (or good) about where they accidentally happened to be born.

That's true when one is a kid, but after being alive for 36 years one wonders how much of one's environment one is responsible for.

And then there are those of us who have realised that we just aren't being listened to by the three main parties (they really only care about themselves these days) and we have looked at what the opposition might be and have looked to protest parties. In the UK, that means either the Greens (if you're left-wing and environmentalist), UKIP (if you're anti-EU or a genuine classical liberal or social conservative) and the BNP (who are for people who hate people who aren't white).

Can't stand George Galloway.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9177902/George-Galloway-celebrates-Blackburn-triumph-on-Twitter-after-winning-Bradford-West-by-election.html

It still annoys me how people are taken in by politicians like him.

Appeasement of islamism has occured in all eurozone countries. I just learned that the center right party I would have otherwise voted for has integrated a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood into the governmental organization, French Council on the Muslim Religion.

The lesson of which we must be reminded - politicians are never to be trusted and the right collaborates with dangerous people just as much as the left.

This collaboration is rather sickening especially considering that money and resources, when allocated to muslims, could help all the women abused by their families and other "apostates" and build shelters for them, instead of supporting hate.