As soon as we play at the enemy’s game of mindless intolerance we have lost the battle

Belgium has already banned it and France is looking to follow suit. Last week banning the burka was even proposed in Britain. I watched the MP, Philip Hollobone trying to defend his motion on the Daily Politics the other day. I afraid to say his defence was pathetic. The crucial moment was when he started ‘we in Britain don’t cover our faces’. At this statement he lost the argument. The point is we in Britain can do whatever we like, as long as it is not a crime and is not inciting others to commit crimes. Usually crimes are defined by the harm they cause to others and hence why the justification for the laws' intervention.

If we are seriously arguing that we want the law to intervene and make a crime of wearing a particular piece of clothing, we wholly turn our back on our sacred liberal, tolerant and free society that we hold dear in Britain. In Britain this has only been achieved through the cost of many lives whose sacrifice was made so that we can enjoy a free society. Indeed, it is those values of freedom and tolerance that we should use to guide us in trying to defend against the culture that the burka originates, in general terms: Islamic fundamentalism. An ideology that does not believe in freedom and tolerance, an ideology that in its darkest and evident form, is so intolerant that it murders innocent lives on a mass scale simply because society does not accept its view of the world.

Islamic fundamentalism is a very real and tangible threat to our society and way of life. We must take our responsibility to fight it very seriously. Once we try to defeat it with intolerance and at the cost of our values, then we forget the reason why we are fighting in the first place. We may as well be two sides fighting for equally meaningless causes.

My personal view of the burka is that I am not particularly keen on it, in fact if I am honest I find it rather sinister. I also believe that it provides a powerful image of Islamic fundamentalism’s inequality in respect of its treatment of women, and I struggle to understand why any women would like to wear one. But that is simply my view. A view, which I am sure some may find offensive, but that is not the point and nor is it that some people find the wearing of the burka offensive. In Britain that it is my right to state my view and it is the Islamic woman's right to wear the burka.

So please Hollobone and co, stop speaking nonsense! Banning the burka is an embarrassingly self-defeating idea. As soon as we play at the enemy’s game of mindless intolerance we have lost the battle.

Apologies to readers for lack of posts over the last couple of weeks, I have been away on holiday. A new post on a non-political subject to appear soon.

Capello should have gone for proving the fallacy that football is a business

In a departure from this blog’s normal focus of arena, perhaps to show I am not only a political geek, I will devote this weeks post to a subject while not political in nature has dominated the news over the last couple of weeks following England’s exit from the World Cup.

The FA in a typical wait-and-see rather than decisive action have belatedly decided that the grossly over paid England manager Fabio Capello shall remain in his post despite England’s under whelming performance at the World Cup. Many football fans I have spoken to have found this a disappointing decision. They wanted Capello to take responsibility for what was a disastrous campaign. However, I think this analysis misses the point. Is Capello the reason for the poor performance of England at the World Cup? The answer is that he is probably partly responsible and as manager it is difficult to see how he in not in part some way culpable. However, the crucial question is to what extent? Let us not forget Capello has one of the best managerial records in the game and the media has been telling us for the last couple of years that he is the man who has master-minded England’s rejuvenation in qualifying for the World Cup including two impressive wins over Croatia. To use a favorite football phrase – you do not become a bad manager over night. Before Capello, we had McLaren. While, he did not have the glittering managerial CV that Capello has, he has since gone on to win the league in the Netherlands. Before that we had Eriksson, another who’s managerial CV is the envy of most top flight managers. All have been and gone, taking the buck for under performance. But what is the common denominator here? Surely, it is the players not the managers.

It is difficult to pin point exactly the reason for such under performance from England. As mentioned, Capello is to blame to some extent, but to a greater extent, it must be other reasons, perhaps England’s innate style of play which continually gets found wanting at internationally level, perhaps player fatigue, perhaps hyper-pressure (as was so apparent by the stage fright performance against Algeria), perhaps it will remain a mystery why this current crop of players, a so called ‘golden generation’ has under performed. At least at the next World Cup, when most of these set would have retired, we can stop wondering why they do not achieve the sum of their parts. And yet it is that mystery which provides for such wonder which must be investigated if we are to ever to learn the lessons of failure. Any such lessons would have been swept under the carpet if the FA had chosen to sack Capello.

A successful businessman and keen football fan argued to me the other evening that he has to hit certain targets in his job and if missed them by a long way then he would have to resign and if he would not resign then he would face the sack anyway. On this basis Capello must go, he continued. This gets to the heart of the problem in football and the mistakes that the FA have made through recent decades. Football cannot be fairly compared to the business world and yet in a way this analysis is absolutely correct. Of course, football is a business in many respects, but in many others it is not a business. Football’s forgetfulness of this most imperative principle has lead to much of its ruin over recent years. Ironically, rather than any other reason, this is why I think Capello should have been sacked. The FA took Capello on, in fantasy- based business terms. He was paid an incredibly inflated salary in the aftermath of the McLaren embarrassment. (No other salary in international management comes anywhere close to that of Capello’s). The FA thought that Capello would buy them success. Capello should have been sacked to prove the fallacy that football is a business and success can be brought effortlessly with simply a big contract.

Why was he not sacked? The real reason is because someone had released a break clause in his contract before the World Cup meaning to sack him now would cost a fortune which the FA did not have. The FA, continue in their long line of form of derogation of duty to protect the game (the two towers of which are their 1983 decision to allow Tottenham Hotspur to float on the stock exchange and their 1992 decision to allow the creation of the Premiership), which confirms that disappointment for England fans will continue for some time to come yet. Politics to return next week…