Matthew Wall: 'an analogue mind in a digital world'

Who will be the Mayor for London Citizens?

Last night around 45 people gathered in an upper room in Waterloo to learn how to spread the word about the London Citizens' Agenda for the 2012 London Mayoral Elections on 3rd May.

As I looked around I saw and chatted to Jews, Baptists, Ehtiopian Orthodox, Catholics, Anglicans, Nonconformists, Muslims, Quakers, students and schoolchildren, people of all religions and none, treating each other with mutual respect and good humour.

I couldn't conceive of another organisation that could assemble such a broad-based, tolerant coalition of community institutions.

Jonathan Lange, one of the founders of the Industrial Areas Foundation in the US and an architect of the Living Wage campaign over there, enthused and engaged his audience as he trained them in the art of canvassing - but canvassing with a crucial difference.

This isn't about plugging one political party over another but asking for wider community support for an agenda that has been democractically voted on and developed following hundreds of listening exercises within member institutions. These institutions include universities and schools, GP surgeries and faith groups, unions and think tanks - some 220 in all. This is about a truly radical, mobilised democracy.

The core of Citizens UK philosophy is the one-to-one relationship. New media is an undoubtedly powerful mobilisation tool, but unless lasting human relationships have been established first - neighbour-to-neighbour, face-to-face - online campaigns tend to become mere fleeting coalitions of single interest that dissipate once the objective has been achieved.

Disciplined, organised citizens who've taken the time and effort to listen to people's concerns are a lasting force for change within their local communities. The Living Wage Campaign, just one of several, is testament to that, having raised the incomes of low-paid families in the metropolitan area by £70 million in total since 2001.

So when Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone, Jenny Jones and Brian Paddick attend the London Citizens Mayoral Assembly at Methodist Central Hall in late April, packed with 2,500 community leaders, they will do so knowing that this is an alliance that cannot be ignored, an alliance representing an awful lot of votes. Their very attendance will testify to that.

This Assembly will be asking the mayoral candidates to endorse their agenda and not vice versa. It's a startling power reversal when you think about it. A new politics in fact.

 

Rehab time for gun-addicted US

As the soul-searching following the Virginia Tech massacre continues, we'll doubtless hear the US gun lobby trot out the facile old canard 'guns don't kill people, people do'. Very wise. But it's a damned sight easier to kill a lot of people with semi-automatic weapons than without them.

Surely it's time for even the most rabidly libertarian gun-toting redneck to realise that curbing access to guns would at least reduce the body-count whenever loner psychos decide to take their revenge upon the world?

I just cannot understand this US obsession with 'the right to bear arms'. It's an addiction, a fetish, a national psychosis. The nation needs therapy and part of the treatment must be an amendment to the Constitution. Less than 1% of all US homicides are in self-defence. Guns do not protect people from violence, they exacerbate it. The evidence is there for all to see. Yet the gun lobby stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

Can the largest democracy in the world heal and reform itself? Will it finally see sense and choose the right to life over the right to kill? Perhaps, but I fear not. The addiction seems too strong and too ingrained.

Deconstructing Dawkins: the rise of secular fundamentalism?

It is open season on religion. God-bashing science fundamentalist Richard Dawkins (above) is frothing at the mouth again about the hordes of dangerous self-deluding religio-freaks rampaging round the world denying evolutionary theory and proclaiming creationism from the rooftops.

Porcine Martin Samuel, sports reporter-cum-heavyweight 'thinkpiece' columnist for the Times, today pretty much equated Catholicism with Nazism in an outrageously specious column supposedly about faith schools.

And as for the poor old Muslims, they could be forgiven for recalling the old adage: just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Because a tiny minority of fundamentalist Muslim women choose to wear the face-covering niqab the entire religion is consequently excoriated as an intolerant, illiberal, belligerent, medieval and barbaric threat to democracy. Race crimes increase. Stupid talk of a 'clash of civilisations' dins in our ears once more.

Normally I ignore Dawkins' bulging-eyed rhetoric as the rantings of a very intelligent idiot with so poor an understanding of religious faith and experience as to make his arguments risible. But a cold shiver went down my spine today when the implications of his logic hit home.

Religious belief, he argues, is a dangerous self-delusion, inimical to rationality and freedom of thought. Believers are to all intents and purposes, mad. You don't have to extrapolate this argument too far to come to some pretty chilling conclusions. For what do societies tend to do with mad, dangerous people? Lock them up, of course. We are only a few steps away from totalitarianism here. Lurking beneath Dawkins' polemic is a rather nasty intolerance of heterodoxy.

The undoubted and worrying rise of religious fundamentalism around the world is breeding the rise of an equally intolerant and dangerous secular fundamentalism. Each brand has its slavish adherence to sacred texts and its firebrand apologists. Each brand is convinced it is the sole purveyor of the truth.

So, for the record, let me speak up for the moderate, tolerant, entirely rational middle ground of believers - those often cowed into silence by the bombastic, the opinionated and the prejudiced.

Many people of faith happily accommodate evolutionary theory into their belief systems and entirely reject the notion that science is necessarily antipathetic to religion.

Many people of faith believe wholeheartedly in freedom of speech and freedom of thought, for without it their faith is not truly voluntary and less worthy as a result.

Many people of faith accept that their own religion is not the repository of all truth and not an exclusive pathway to God, accepting that non-believers are as equally capable of goodness, kindness and compassion as believers.

Many people of faith despair when fundamentalists hijack their religion for political ends, deliberately misinterpreting texts to justify acts of brutality, intolerance and repression. And many people of faith unequivocally reject the notion that they have a duty or a right to impose their beliefs on others.   

But do you hear from these mealy-mouthed moderates in the media? Rarely. They do not make good copy. They are not controversial. They do not cause outrage or offence. They do not sell papers or increase ratings.

But unless this silent - silenced - majority has the timerity to speak up against the fundamentalists on both sides - to challenge prejudices, to correct misunderstandings - we will leave the battlefield wide open to  those zealous factions.

Then liberalism, respect, tolerance, freedom of speech could all get caught in the crossfire - collateral damage in a fundamentalist war most of us do not want.

If only we would say so.

Care Not Killing

It is deeply ironic that at the same time the Government is making noises about giving old people more respect Lord Joffe is sponsoring a Bill to allow physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill.

The main reason to oppose this Bill is that a 'right to die' would quickly become a 'duty to die' in a youth-obsessed society that sees the old and sick as a burden and a drain on public resources. The terminally-ill might feel duty-bound to hasten their ends though a sense of guilt and shame, especially if the cost of care were eating into heir children's inheritances. Making this Bill law would be the thin end of the wedge.

Joffe's Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill was introduded into the House of Lords on 9 November 2005 and is expected to receive its Second Reading on 12 May 2006.

A wide cross-section of organisations have banded together to form an alliance called Care Not Killing in opposition to the Bill. Please visit their website to find out more and sign their petition.