Art and immortality go hand in hand. Artists aspire to escape their own inevitable end by creating something that will live on. As William Faulkner put it:

Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal… This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

The problem with immortality is that it has been reserved for the few, and even then it is uncertain. We know the epic poetry of Homer and the confessions of Saint Augustine because of the care and trouble expended on making copies by hand. In fact, Homer quite probably extends back to an oral tradition, so we owe a debt to the people who retold and memorized the verse. Paintings and, better still, sculptures may last, but only if properly taken care of. The Greeks would like the return of the Parthenon marbles and feel they would take better care of them than the Brits how sawed them off. However, Lord Elgin might never have had the chance to remove them if the Parthenon had not already been ruined and looted when, in 1687, the Venetians blew up the gunpowder stored there by the Ottomans. Even in the modern day, great works can be lost. Many historic treasures were stolen in the aftermath of the war in Iraq. In Feburary, a Cézanne, a Degas, a van Gogh and a Monet with an estimated collective worth of US$163 million were stolen from Zurich Museum. It is easiest to preserve film and audio recordings, because they are the easiest artworks to copy. But as recently as the 1970’s the BBC would wipe and reuse their tapes to keep costs down. Famous television shows like Not Only… But Also, starring Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, were lost. The lack of foresight in that case is even more astounding when you discover that Peter Cook had offered to pay for the tapes out of his own wallet. Perhaps there is nothing truly immortal in art, and that might encourage us to take the same attitude as Woody Allen:

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

The good news is that technology not only opens up art to an ever increasing number of people, it also gives us a long tail where a creative work will remain available and accessible to all of us, even if only a very few us want it. By virtue of the internet, the greatest distribution mechanism ever devised, work can live on indefinitely. In fact, the only threat to the lifespan of art is that it will be owned and wasted by modern-day corporations that are as blinkered by the bottom-line as the BBC was when wiping their own recordings. An unhealthy obsession with property rights might lead some works to become extinct that would otherwise have been cared for and curated by somebody in the public. Nevertheless, art inspires, and there will be people inspired to reserve a little corner of the internet for their own favourite works. We can assume that a lot of modern work is immediately adapted for, promoted by, and sold over the internet. However, it is heartening to see that people are making efforts to preserve anything and everything they value. I recently found an odd little webpage devoted to a minor character of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. See here for a page inspired by Rob McKenna, trucker and god of rain. This prompted me to look for other extreme URL oddities that could only exist with the intention to preserve obscure instances of creativity. I decided to search by using a kind of free association - typing whatever references came to mind directly into my browser and adding the obligatory .com to the end. It did not take long to get lucky. Most of these sites still have some work to do, but hats off to the creators for establishing footholds and foothills amongst the internet’s mountainous collective archive. This is what I found…

Bananasplits.com announces that the Banana Splits are coming soon, and nothing else. Given the Banana Splits with a kids television show shown in the late 60’s, one wonders if this webpage fell through a timewarp.

Butch Patrick, who played little Eddie Munster in The Munsters probably wishes he did fall through a timewarp. There is a page dedicated to him at eddiemunster.com. Given that is appears to have been scraped from another site, I guess Butch can afford the domain name but not much else…

Lawrence of Arabia was a splendid movie directed by David Lean and starring Peter O’Toole (who arguably should have got the Academy Award for his performance). At the moment they have a photo from the film, and the site exhorts you to contact them, but says nothing else. One can only guess what the response would be like if you did send them an email.

666.com turns out to be far less sinister than would think given the URL. The rather creepy unsmiling photo on the home page might also make you wonder. But it turns out it is just the repository for paintings and writings by hopeful artist Benjamin P. Wing. Good for him for believing in himself, and having some creative hobbies to go alongside his doctoral studies in computational linguistics. He should probably swap to a less macabre domain name, though.

Shinymetalass.com has a URL that is the catchphrase of Bender Bending Rodríguez from animated series Futurama, recently revived by its creator, Matt Groening of Simpsons fame. However, the URL maps to the same page as AKFlyfishing.com, and consists of quotes from artists. So far I have seen a quote from Swiss writer Henri-Frédéric Amiel and one from American artist Russell Chatham about fishing. You tell me if this will end up being about the cartoon series, quotes, art, angling, or a mixture of them all.

My favourite find was jrhartley.com. The page consists solely of the name J.R. Hartley imposed in large letters over a background of what looks like tall grasses. Heck knows what you would make of it, or why you would look for it, unless you remember the legendary British advert for Yellow Pages where an old man searches for a book called Fly Fishing by J.R. Hartley. At least, I assume that was the inspiration for this webpage. To remind or acquaint yourself with this classic ad, click below.

Looking at these sites, there is obviously a lot more work to do, but it is a start. If the internet provides an everlasting home for Rob McKenna, Eddie Munster, Lawrence of Arabia and J.R. Hartley, that is a good thing. Perhaps we can all live there forever…

Inheritance tax is the tax that seemingly everyone hates. Wherever you look, you cannot find a politician who argues for it. They all seem to be outdoing each other with promises to cut it or scrap it altogether. Perhaps they are just trying to please voters. The e-petition to scrap inheritance tax was the fourth most popular petition since the UK government introduced e-petitions. A total of 128,622 people clicked their mouse button to have their say. With the whole world seemingly against inheritance tax, apart from a few notable exceptions that I will come to later, I guess it is up to people like me to make the argument for increasing it.

The economic arguments behind cutting taxes are pretty straightforward. If you cut taxes, you give people more incentive to work. They then work harder, are more productive, earn more, and generate more total tax anyhow. Hence you can get a virtuous circle and still be able to pay for welfare and wars and all those other things you need the state for. Generally, cutting taxes is seen as a way to stimulate economies. Now, if there is one tax cut that will not stimulate the economy, it has to be an inheritance tax cut. When it comes to money and death, you cannot take it with you. The incentive to work hard and make money is generally going to be higher if you are intending to spend that money on yourself, rather than on hoarding it and distributing it in your will. People, of course, want to leave their worldly possessions to their offspring. Nothing wrong with that, but then there is nothing wrong with giving your offspring gifts whilst you are alive. If people opt to hold on to their wealth until their dying day, that rather clarifies who is their number one priority, no matter how much sentimental humbug we might have for the deceased. If you are thinking ahead to the day you die, there is no harm in spreading your possessions well before that day, in which case inheritance tax should make no impact on your attitude to work and to making money. If you are not thinking ahead to the day you die, then you are not thinking about inheritance tax either, so the rate of inheritance tax would be irrelevant when it comes to motivating you to work. Whatever logic we apply to taxes on the living, we should reverse for the dead. Taxing inheritances does not disincentivize the dead, but not taxing inheritances can disincentivize the living. Why work, if you can just live off the accumulated wealth of your forebears? Or, if you still have to work, an inheritance at least means you do not have to work as hard as you might to get the standard of living you enjoy. If you decrease inheritance tax, and increase taxes on the living to compensate, you just encourage the people waiting for a payout to do just that - they will wait, instead of working hard and making their own way in life. In contrast, higher employment taxes will discourage the people who start with nothing and have to work their way up.

One current debating point is that, because of house price rises, inheritance tax is immoral. The basis of this argument is that people will have to sell the family home to pay for the inheritance tax when the owner dies. Excuse me if my heart does not bleed profusely at the thought. So someone inherits a big valuable asset, the value of which has grown greatly in the last few decades because of economic factors and not because of hard work. They then sell it off, pay a tax bill, and get to keep the rest. What is so immoral about that? Compare that fate to those of people who cannot afford to buy a house, as a result of the disproportionate growth in house prices, because they have no inheritance, and because the supply of houses is limited by profiteering builders and endless nimby planning restrictions. Then tell me which is the more immoral. Put simply, the trend is for fewer and fewer people to live in each house. Houses that could accommodate families are increasingly being owned and lived in by old people, often alone. Where does it say that it is morally necessary that these houses be gifted, free of tax, in their wills? Presumably then the benefactors can choose either to live in the house, or put it on the market to make the most money they can. Hmmm. None of this helps liquidity in the housing market. First-time buyers would be much better off if more houses were on the market, and sellers were keen because they had to settle a big tax bill. Instead of reducing inheritance tax, and assisting the better-off in keeping an economic advantage created by the uneven distribution of housing wealth, increasing inheritance tax would help first-time buyers - people who are working hard and want a home to raise a family - by putting more housing stock on the market at more realistic prices.

Another argument is that inheritance tax is a double tax, and hence wrong. Hmmm. Governments say they do not tax you twice, but they do all the time. Why inheritance tax should be an exception I do not know. For example, you make money, get taxed, spend money, get taxed. That looks like double taxation to me. You make money, get taxed, buy a valuable asset and give it to your kids. Guess what? There is capital gains tax on the gift. If anything, inheritance tax is the only tax that is definitely not double taxation. You make some money and get taxed, then you die and your kids get taxed. That makes it the only tax where you can be sure the same person is not being stung twice.

If you ask you a silly question, you generally get a silly answer. The funny thing is that people cannot tell which questions are silly, unless you make it obvious. Here are some examples. If you ask people whether taxes should be lowered, they will agree. If you ask people if governments should spend more on services, they will agree. And if you ask people if governments should balance budgets and not rely on borrowing, they will agree. Hmmm. We do not know how the aforementioned petitioners intended to offset the loss in tax income caused by scrapping inheritance tax. Rather unhelpfully, they were silent on that topic. Let us assume that they would make up the shortfall by increasing taxes elsewhere. So let us be clear on this - reducing inheritance tax is the same as making it harder for poor people to earn more and get on in life. If you start poor, inheritance tax is irrelevant. What is relevant is the taxes you pay on the work that you do. So scrapping inheritance tax, if balanced by an increase in other taxes, would reduce social mobility. It would help to keep the wealthier wealthier and the poorer poorer. It shifts the tax burden away from people who inherit wealth they did not work for, and on to people who do not inherit wealth and pay taxes on their earnings and consumption. So I can understand why the economic conservatives like the idea, but I am confused why so many lefties favour a reduction in inheritance tax. The only possible explanation is that they think it will win votes and they can just borrow some money to make up the shortfall in government finances. That way everybody wins… apart from the great-grandchildren who will still have to service the debt. Presumably the great-grandchildren who did not inherit from their parents who did not inherit from their parents who did not inherit from their parents will still be the ones bearing a higher share of the tax burden. But then, today’s politicians will be dead by then, and hence long past caring about their political inheritance…

Ah yes, think of the children. That is what the argument about inheritance tax is about, is it not? Think of your children. Your right to give them your belongings, without the horrid state interfering… Well, think about that for a moment. Which is better, that your inheritance get taxed, or their earnings get taxed? If the total taxation take by government is the same, I say tax the inheritance. At least then children will grow up with a better chance of understanding that rewards should come from hard work, and not from accidents of birth. They might well have the motivation to do more in life. Most importantly, the hard workers will be better off. If your children work hard, and earn a lot, they would be better off with a smaller inheritance and keeping more of their earnings. On the other hand, if your children are lazy, they would be better off keeping a larger share of the inheritance and paying more tax on their earnings. So those petitioners who want to scrap inheritance tax are saying, in a roundabout way, that they think their children are lazy and would be better off with higher taxes on their earnings than on their unearned inheritance. How about that for a vote of no confidence in their own parenting skills!

Truth is, no matter how you cut the tax pie, if the total size of the pie is to stay the same, then the only decision is who will be better off and who worse off. Reducing inheritance tax ultimately helps the richer and not the poorer. If you then have income tax rules aimed at not squeezing people at the bottom, guess who gets squeezed? The people in the middle. A lot of middle earners are swallowing, and talking, a lot of bull about inheritance tax hurting them. Hmmm. So how does a modest one-off reduction to the middle earners, and a large reduction to the top tax payers make the world a better place for middle earners? It does not. In fact, it makes it worse. Consider where the money is going to come from to make up the tax shortfall. Probably not from the very poorest, who will suffer a smaller burden anyhow. Not the richest - any clever argument that the rich benefit from tax planning to avoid inheritance tax can just as well be applied to each and every tax. Nope, the people who will pay more are the ones in the middle. Cutting inheritance tax may make the rich better off, but the middle will only end up coughing up more cash in other taxes to more than make up for any benefit they gain. The irony here is that a vote-pleaser with the middle income bracket will probably hurt them most in the long run, as they will receive much smaller benefits than the rich, and they will carry a greater burden of the income taxes that would have to go up to compensate.

One last thought about children and inheritance tax. It seems governments are increasingly falling over themselves to be seen as the providers for families and children. Flexible work hours, family tax credits, parental leave from work, better investment in schools as well as healthcare for children … all great for people who receive the benefits. Also increasingly irritating for the childless singletons who find themselves having to subsidize it all. Family-friendly political policies may ultimately be the surest way of undermining the family as the cornerstone of our society. Subsidies make it easier for the reckless to fund and manage a family. In contrast, an increased burden on those without children penalizes those people who take a responsible attitude and want to be financially secure before bringing children into this world. In the end, the responsible people will be paying more tax whilst they are saving for their own families, in order to subsidize the irresponsible families that will be at greatest danger, and hence will be loudest in demanding more assistance, if there is a severe economic downturn. The risks of making the most responsible people work ever harder in order to save for a house and family seems not to have dawned on most politicians. My point here is about who benefits from lower inheritance tax must be seen in the context of overall changes that help to shape our society. The immediate beneficiaries of reduced inheritance tax would be the children of those who already have wealth. Combined with other factors, it will help accelerate the trend towards a two-speed society and two-speed economy. On one side, we will have a hard working, high taxed, joyless economy for singletons, especially if they start poor, have no inheritance, and intend to save to get on the housing ladder and have children of their own. On the other side, we will have families that enjoy quality time, low tax, and a family-friendly economy. They will have children. They will be subsidized, even if they start wealthy and inherit a house suitable to raise a family (maybe used to raise their own, or maybe just rented out to make money from somebody else). The poor will be subsidized even more if they have a family, but the subsidy will not be enough to close the gap to the better off. However, the subsidy may be enough to make them better off than their peers who decided to work and save before having a family. This looks to me like the construction of a sophisticated but damning poverty trap, where the poor are better off with families and part-time work than without families and in full-time work. The only people who really lose out are the ones who start poor and work hard to better themselves - they will bear the brunt of having to subsidize others. They will be working the long hours whilst others leave early or have career breaks to raise kids. They will generate the tax income to pay for health and education services. They will pay a disproportionate level of tax relative to their earnings, and not receive benefits. And because they started out with no inheritance, reducing or scrapping inheritance tax is of no benefit to them. In fact, it penalizes them even further, as they end up paying more tax on their earnings to compensate for the loss in tax revenues.

Just as tax cannot be divorced from spending or borrowing, so the impact of a change in inheritance tax should not be considered separately from the impact of other policies towards taxation and spending. They all help to determine the nature of our society. At present, the forces all seem to pushing the same way, and when that happens you may have one section of society of happier, but only by punishing the losers. Hopefully even the most arrogant of tinkering politicians can now see what happens if you constantly rob Peter to pay Paul. What irks me is that so many are agreed on who the winners should be, and hence who will be the losers by default, that nobody seems to have noticed that the losers may very well be the people who most deserve to be helped and rewarded if society wants to encourage family values and economic productivity.

Can 128,622 people who sign a petition be wrong? Of course! For every 128,622 who sees no contradiction in wanting lower taxes, higher spending, and a balanced government budget, you can probably find one person who talks some sense. Warren Buffett is by any measure a very wealthy man. From time to time, on some lists, he is stated to be the wealthiest man. For example, Forbes says he is worth US$62bn. Yet Buffett believes in taxing the rich Americans more, and the poor Americans less, and that death taxes are a key vehicle for achieving that goal. Buffett spoke with wit and venom on the topic when he attended the Senate hearings considering the reduction or removal of the American estate tax. You can see the video and read the transcript of what Buffett said to the Senate hearing here. For context, you can see the full video of the hearing here. Back in 1986, Buffett gave an interview to Fortune Magazine where he stated his attitude to the inheritance he would give his children.

Enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.

Twenty years hence, Buffett is still going strong, but is a man of his word; he has made plans to leave the vast bulk of his wealth to charity, mostly through the charitable foundation set up by Bill and Melinda Gates. His children profess they have been happy that their father has set them such a good example. Nobody can be quite sure what he has left them. However, all the indications from their lifestyle are that it is in line, allowing for inflation, with what he said in 1986. Back then he suggested that an inheritance of a few hundred thousand dollars would be sufficient, including the cost of a college education. That puts our petitioners into perspective. The inheritance tax rules in the UK were changed in 2007 to give an effective threshold of UK£300,000 for singletons, and UK£600,000 for couples. Per my rough calculations for inflations and exchange rates, Buffett’s few hundred thousand dollars in 1986 would be approximately equal to a few hundred thousand pounds today. So by Buffett’s standards, it looks like the British tax code is now lenient enough to result in no tax penalties for the kind of inheritance that Buffett will leave for his children. If that is enough for the children of the richest man on the planet, I struggle to sympathize with the arguments of the petitioners who want to scrap the tax completely, but do not offer any explanation for who will make up the shortfall. For me, the equation is simple. Tax the dead, and not the living, if you want people to work for the future, and not live off the past.

The Bible is a popular book, no doubt about it. It may well be the most popular book of all time. Which I guess it should be, if it was written by God, by way of a little help from his friends. Popular though it is, when people say they read the Bible, they usually mean they read passages from the Bible, not the whole thing cover to cover. I may be no Christian, but when I was a teenager, I read the Bible - from cover to cover. Do not ask why. I was an odd kid. I read it, in sequence, over the course of 2 weeks, starting with Genesis and “In the beginning…” and ending with Revelation and “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.”. Apologies to any Jews who think I should have stopped at the end of the Old Testament.

Since reading the Bible, I have been surprised just how useful the experience was. It is not that I believe every word of the Bible is true. I have a lot of sympathy for guidance like turning the other cheek, but there are plenty of other passages that I would not trust. That said, the Bible is important. It is a bedrock that motivates and guides many people, and underpins conventional morality and behaviour in much of the world. However, reading the Bible has also taught me that a lot of people make a lot of really ridiculous claims about it. Presumably most people do not argue with these claims because they are ignorant of what the Bible says, they rationalize and agree with the claim no matter how absurd it is, or they are simply too polite. I am none of those. Take a look at this extract from an online ministry:

Even though it is really sixty-six individual books, written on three continents, in three different languages, over a period of approximately 1500 years, by more that 40 authors (who came from many walks of life), the Bible remains one unified book from beginning to end without contradiction. This unity is unique from all other books and is evidence of the divine origin of the words as God moved men in such a way that they recorded His very words.

Excuse me? The Bible does contain contradictions. Arguing that the Bible does not contain any contradictions is like suggesting that the agreements reached by a group of politicians or diplomats will always be interpreted and implemented in the same way. Clearly that is not true. In many walks of life we can find different groups of people who agree to accept the same formulation of words, such as a contract, or a law, or even a statement made in a debate, at one point in time, but later insist on taking contradictory interpretations of what the words mean. Not every nuance of meaning can be tested at the time when words are written down. Some possible meanings will only be deliberated over in response to unforeseen later challenges. In fact, sometimes the challenges are foreseen, but for pragmatic reasons we get on with writing the words and leave any ambiguities to be dealt with later on. The Bible magnifies this problem many-fold by saying so many things in so many different ways. The Christian Bible comes in two sections. In the New Testament, there is a sequence of stories where Jesus keeps telling people they misunderstood the Old Testament. Jesus was quite the diplomat. He never finds fault with the words themselves, but merely suggests people need to read them differently. In other words, the most straightforward and literal interpretation often turns out to be wrong, according to Jesus. For example, when Jesus talks about turning the other cheek, he does so in reference to the eye for an eye rule found in Exodus and elsewhere. You would have to be a pretty unreasonable person not to see how people might be confused. They read their Bible, and follow some rule about an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and all that. You think it means that if somebody kicks you in the shin, then the just punishment is that they get a kick in the shin too. Then some new beardy weirdy guy shows up and says you misunderstood. He says that the rule means if somebody slaps you on the cheek you should meekly offer the other cheek for a slap, or in the case of the kicking of shins, you should roll up the other trouser leg. No wonder the Jews and Christians went their separate ways.

I am most baffled and bemused when I hear people say the Bible is the literal truth and that we should follow it word for word. Well, great, I guess that might work. At least then we would all know which rulebook to use. Sadly, there is only one flaw with that approach. We already have thousands of people in this world, all saying they follow the Bible literally, and yet all doing things that are inconsistent with one other. No amount of faith and Bible study will be enough to teach some people the difference between good and bad. Take the Westboro Baptist Church as an example. They seem to be utterly sincere and very dedicated to the literal interpretation they have taken from the Bible. This literal interpretation of the Bible, the very same Bible that everybody else has been reading, has lead them to the following conclusions:

• God hates fags.
• God hates America.
• God hates Sweden.
• God hates Canada, Ireland, Mexico and pretty much any country you can name plus all the ones you cannot.
• We should thank God for the soldiers killed in Iraq.
• We should thank God for cyclones, earthquakes, whirlwinds and pretty much any other disaster that kills people.
• It is a good idea to picket the funerals of American soldiers, to share with grieving families the news that their loved ones deserve to die.
• It is a good idea to go to Beijing and picket the Olympic games, for reasons pretty similar to all of the above.
• It is a good idea to picket pretty much anything so long as you make it clear that God is angry with us for our sins and is punishing us and we deserve it.

Here is the website of the Westboro Baptist Church. Just in case anybody is confused, I am telling you what they say, and pointing you at their site so you can double-check it for yourself. I do not agree with it. That also means I do not agree with the actions of a group of people who sincerely believe they are following the instructions of God as literally communicated in the Bible. Which also explains why I find it problematic when people insist that we should all rely on a literal interpretation of the Bible. In practice, many people reach entirely different interpretations of right and wrong, even when reading the Bible literally.

Thankfully, most people do not follow the instructions in the Bible literally. If we did, the world would be an even more miserable place. Even people who say they are Christian do not follow most of the instructions in the Bible. Even the fundamentalists who insist on a literal reading do not follow all of the literal instructions. Now, at this point in arguments about the bible, it is common to bring up all passages that cause most upset and get emotions running high. In a slight deviation from that theme, let me list a few passages that either upset people, or should upset people, if they did not choose to ignore them.

• God does not like it when men have sex with other men (one of the favourite passages of the Westboro Baptist Church).
• If a man is caught raping a woman who is not married or engaged to another man, he has to pay her father some money, and marry the woman, and can never divorce the woman (hmmm… tough luck on the innocent rape victim).
• Slavery is okay, so long as you follow rules like not beating slaves to death (but beating them is fine if the slave can get up in a day or two).

Despite all the emotion sparked by Bible passages like this, or more correctly because they provoke so much emotion, I do not believe these passages are good counter-examples to treating the Bible as literal truth. Having read the Bible, cover to cover, I can assure you that a lot of it is very mundane. Mundane, and, for the modern world we live in, silly. Just silly. There are plenty of rules that may have made sense at the time and place they were written, but which would just be daft if followed now. Here are a few:

• Do not wear clothes made of multiple fabrics, like a combination of wool and linen (better read those labels carefully next time you go shopping).
• New houses should have railings around the edge of the roof (early example of the creeping obsession with health and safety).
• If you sit on a chair previously sat on by a woman having her monthly period, you must wash your clothes and have a bath (could cause problems when using office hotdesks and public transport).

My favourite passages in the Bible describe the rules for treating mildew. Seriously. They really stuck in my memory. I guess I like them because they really are very literal, very straightforward, and very silly by modern standards. I also like them because they are pretty close to that passage about God hating male homosexuality, which rather puts things into context. People get the wrong attitude about the Bible, if they only read, or are told, some key passages and remain unaware of the rest. Let me summarize the rules that God gave Moses and Aaron about mildew in your abode. if you notice mildew in your house, take all the furniture outside and get a priest to come over and check it out. If the priest notices some green or red spots on the walls, he will come back in seven days. If the spots are still there when he gets back, then you have to tear down all the plaster from every wall, plus tear down the parts of the walls that had mildew. Once you have rebuilt, the priest will come back again in a while. If there is mildew again, the house is buggered and you have to knock the whole thing down.

There you have it: proof, as good as I can get it, that nobody follows all of the rules stated in the Bible. Some may say they follow the Bible literally, and try to make some clever points about the difference between being literal and using figures of speech. However, the rules about mildew are no figure of speech. They are as literal as can be. However, I am also extremely confident that there is not a single person alive today who would follow those rules literally. For a start, what kind of crazy priest would want to come over your house and look at mildew? And even if there was a willing priest, who would remove all their possessions from the house first? Consider also the not very ingenious solutions offered: you get to knock down part of your house if you are lucky. If the mildew persists, you knock down the whole house. I guess that means modern advice on the treatment of mildew is blasphemy. Methinks that even the most ardent fundamentalists must be conveniently ignoring some parts of the Bible.

Yup, you cannot have your cake and eat it. You cannot insist that the Bible is 100% the word of God, totally consistent, all correct, and to be followed literally, and then opt to ignore certain parts. People usually focus on the bits about love, or hate. Apply a broader perspective, and it is easy for a modern reader to find fault with the Bible. The Bible is full of down to earth instructions on how to deal with mundane practical problems. Guess what? The rules that were relevant to people with the ancient technology, science and knowledge are not relevant today. Nobody would follow them any more, whether they are a good Christian or not. Breaking the rule about mildew does not make you a bad person in my eyes, and God must be a silly bugger if he plans to send you hell for something like that. However, anyone who says they follow the whole literal truth of the Bible should be examined against their own self-imposed standards. By those standards, their credibility takes a beating for every passage in the Bible that states a mundane, but archaic, rule for practical life.

Oh well, I guess even the most god-fearing folk will err from time to time. By the looks of this picture of Westboro Baptist Church, somebody forgot to put those railings on the roof…

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Sir Winston Churchill, Speech to the House of Commons, 11^th November 1947

I think there is something paradoxical in the idea that people should elect their leaders. An election is a kind of collective decision. The decision will select some person or people who will govern. By government, we mean making decisions. The voter is hence trying to decide who will make the best decisions. If that is the case, should we expect the decisions made by a democratic government to be any better than we would make ourselves, if we magically awoke to find ourselves in government? Or those made by our neighbours? Or made by those pig-ignorant people who voted the opposite way to ourselves at the last election? Or made by those pig-ignorant people who did not bother to vote? What if I happen to be pig-ignorant, but I just do not realize it?

Think of it this way. The very best decisions are going to be unpopular or hard to understand. You may want to read that last sentence again. I am not saying that unpopular decisions are likely to be the best decisions. There is a difference, though perhaps the average politician and the average voter might not see the difference. For any decision, there will be a number of alternatives. In fact, there will be a very great number of alternatives, if we include silly ones. Some alternatives will be popular, others unpopular. Some will be easy to understand, others hard to understand. Many will be silly, but usually politicians do not propose the silly options. Usually. Cicciolina, the porn star who was elected to the Italian Parliament for five years in the 1980’s, offered to have sex with Osama Bin Laden if he would stop being a terrorist. Pretty silly. She also offered to have sex with Saddam Hussein if he would just co-operate with the UN. Pretty silly too, though an offer like that has a better chance coming from her than it would if it came from Hans Blix. To be fair, at least Cicciolina’s proposals were pretty easy to understand. The logic seems to be that sex is nice, Saddam may be a bit sexually frustrated, and maybe if he got laid he would relax a little. Compare Cicciolina’s thought process to this example of esoteric reasoning:

The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light - through the prism of our experience on 9/11.

Donald Rumsfeld, Report to US Senate Armed Services Committee, July 2003

Compared to Rumsfeld’s logic, parachuting porn stars into Baghdad is a masterpiece of clear thinking. To any political question there will be innumerable silly answers, a number of answers that are not silly, but only one which is best. If the best conclusion to any decision is easy to understand and popular, that is fine by me. However, we do not pick politicians to address only the problems where solutions are easy to understand and popular. We would not need governments if that was all there was to it. No, we need people to impose decisions when others find those decisions hard to make. As Shelley poetically put it:

Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.

The best decisions are going to be unpopular or hard to understand. Not only are they right, but they are difficult to make. Only with the benefit of hindsight, and a bit of luck, will we be able to identify which truly were the best decisions. But if we only understand with hindsight, how are we, as people, supposed to pick our leaders?

Of course, it is not enough that we agree on how to do things. We also need to reach some kind of agreement on what we want to achieve. Cicciolina, Blix and Rumsfled, for example, were all in agreement that verifying the extent of Iraq’s arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction would be a good idea. They only differed on how to do it. Blix thought he should just look for them. Cicciolina thought she should shag a horny dictator, then ask the dictator to let Blix have a good look for them. Rumsfeld thought the US military should carpet bomb Iraq’s military, incur a little collateral damage (also known as killing innocent bystanders), remove the dictator, take control of the country, then ask somebody other than Blix to look for them. Rumsfeld got his way in the end. The conclusion was that Iraq had some strong bleach in the cupboard under the kitchen sink, and the capability to project it as far as ten yards if deployed using imported super soaker technology. Intelligence is still divided on whether it would have been possible to ready the super soaker for use within 45 minutes and whether Syria was involved in the transportation of super soakers into Iraq. With hindsight, then, starting a war may have seemed disproportionate to the goal of checking for WMD. Luckily, with hindsight, it turned out that nobody running the war was wanting to check for WMD anyhow. It turned out their real goal was regime change. Phew, good job they kept their real intention secret, or you would have to conclude they made a terrible mistake. When everyone else wanted to leave Saddam Hussein be, but double-check if he had the ability to kill every man, woman and child on the planet, it turns out that the war leaders wanted rid of him, and were not that concerned about WMD after all. It turns out they wanted to replace Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship with a democratically-elected government, because he was a bad man and because democracy is a good thing. Pretty straightforward, huh? No doubt the US taxpayer considers US$500bn and some Iraqi lives, and some American lives, a small price to pay to see democratic elections in Baghdad.

Ah yes, Tony Blair… he loves democracy. Though modest compared to the US contribution, he loved democracy so much that he decided the British taxpayer should pay something more than UK£5bn to confirm that Saddam Hussein had the capability to scare crows using fireworks that make a loud bang…. I mean, to manage a transition to peace and prosperity for the Iraqi people… I mean, well, to achieve whatever it is the Brits are supposed to be achieving in Iraq these days. What a shame there was not a little bit more money to protect the lives of British troops with things like body armour. However, I digress. Here is a short list of other places that the Brits governed during the 20th century:

• Pakistan
• Zimbabwe, formerly known as Rhodesia
• Burma, otherwise known as Myanmar

Noticed any of these in the news recently? Yes, they all seem to have a spot of bother when it comes to running democratic elections, amongst other things. Now, of course these things are complicated and I am not going to suggest that the Brits did a much worse job of running those parts of the world than any other people would have. But the history of these countries does suggest that well-intentioned attempts by powers like the UK to foster democracy in other nations is by no means certain to succeed.

Churchill had good reason to be philosophical about democracy. As a politician he had a torrid career. At the age of 35, he had reached a position where he was Home Secretary, in his 50’s he was an isolated figure and out of power, at 66 he was the great war leader for WWII, 5 years later he was out of power after losing the post-war national election, and another 6 years later he was back as PM and leader of the country. During all that time he was quoted and misquoted many times. Sometimes he said things that deserved condemnation, other times he was falsely accused. He did not preach a universal gospel of democracy. He praised the Italian Fascist dictator Mussolini, and said of India’s independence leader, Gandhi:

It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle-Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace… to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.

Nor was Churchill averse to putting his own political interests first and foremost. He changed political parties twice, swapping from Conservatives to Liberals and back to Conservatives. Of the second swap, he said:

Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat

With a career like that, one can imagine what he might think about having been voted the Greatest Briton in a very large poll a few years ago.

If Churchill was a great leader, it is because he was willing to risk being unpopular, and to make decisions that people did not like. One of his finest speeches, and one which is often quoted, is ill-appreciated today, as people forget the historical context. Here is the best-known excerpt from Churchill’s speech of June 4, 1940, to the House of Commons:

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Stirring stuff. Now remember the context. Churchill spoke at a time when defeat looked almost certain. The speech was made shortly after the collapse of the Belgian army, with the defeat of France appearing highly likely, and an under-strength British army lucky to have made a desperate retreat across the Channel and forced to leave much of their equipment behind. The German war machine was strong and capable. Many Brits had advocated, and would continue to advocate, seeking a deal with Hitler’s Germany. In the midst of that, Churchill states his decision clearly: to fight, to the end, to never surrender, even if Britain was invaded. It is the decision of a leader: a clear signal to all not to waste time and energy wondering about what-ifs and alternatives. A signal to buckle down and concentrate all energies on winning the war.

Herein lies the paradox of democracy. There is a natural scepticism to politicians, that they are obsessed with soundbites and opinion polls. Put that another way, and the criticism is that they are not so much leaders, as people who wait to see where the crowd is going and then rush to quickly place themselves at the front. However, what do we expect? Politicians who march in their own direction, and so risk not having popular support, seem to be equally chided by the electorate, or at least by the media who stand as the electorate’s proxy. A constant obsession with supposed gaffs has created politicians who are careful not to say anything. A constant obsession with supposed controversy has created politicians unable to take a stand. What we have instead is the obsession with the unknown politician, or better still, the so-called non-politician or outsider. Take somebody who has no track record, but who looks good and speaks well, and carefully present them as a moderate that anyone can sympathize with. All they need to do is to make less mistakes, and keep saying things that are both popular and easy to understand. Whether it is David Cameron, leader of the British Conservative Party, or Barack Obama of the US Democrats, there is a clear advantage in not having a track record. As Obama will have noted of late, that advantage will dissipate if people start raking through your history looking for the muck. Nevertheless, there seems to be an inherent gullibility when voters look for outsiders who they believe have share the same moral compass as the ordinary person (whoever that is) by sitting outside the norms of political expediency. When they do so, they seem to ignore that most of these outsiders are merely individuals who have never taken much of a stance on anything.

Despite my own cynicism, voters in democracies prove my cynicism wrong as often as they prove it right. I have no idea if Boris Johnson will be a good mayor of London, but I am glad he got elected. He defeated the incumbent, Ken Livingstone, by succeeding where others had failed - by getting a large number of the electorate to take notice and take the trouble to vote. The major criticisms during his campaign were that he is a buffoon, is prone to gaffs, comes from a posh background and has no administration experience of any note. I have never heard a more pathetic series of reasons not to elect someone. If by a buffoon who is prone to gaffs, people mean Boris Johnson has a big personality, and he says a lot of things, some frivolous, some ill-judged and some things that people will dislike, then I consider that to be an advantage. Better that than someone who says nothing and spends their time crafting soundbites to suit opinion polls. His opponent, Ken Livingstone, was just as prone to outrageous outbursts, which included likening the job of a Jewish reporter for a right-wing newspaper to a guard at a Nazi extermination camp. If Johnson is playing to the gallery, at least he is trying to be witty as well as populist. Johnson is posh? Yup, like so many other British politicians. His schoolmaster at Eton was house master of Tony Blair at Fettes. It is inverse snobbery to complain that somebody with an extremely privileged education must be less well qualified to make decisions as a consequence. He has no experience? What of it… Before being a politician, Gordon Brown was an academic and journalist. Ken Livingstone was a cancer research technician. Most of them are lawyers; I struggle to imagine a profession less inclined to ground someone in what we might call the real world. If politicians needed to prove themselves before getting elected to power, then most politicians should never have been elected. A much-quoted buffoon and wit, with a privileged education who made money from journalism before entering politics? I could be writing about Winston Churchill….

In the end, democracies do not work well when voters do not vote well. If voters pick scoundrels and fools, they find their government robs them and ruins them. Voters that stay at home and do nothing have no right to complain if someone else picks a scoundrel or fool. If only scoundrels or fools stand as candidates, voters should remind themselves that any one of them could have stood for election. And if scoundrels and fools do sometimes get elected, then voters need to be sure they at least pick people that they will be able to remove at the next election. That is why democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others. However bad the decision of the voters, they get the chance to change their minds. Or not, as shown in the case of Bush and Blair. Voters have no right to be disenchanted about politics in a democracy. They might as well be disenchanted with themselves. There is no need to complain when their preferred candidate loses - that is tantamount to saying other people should not be allowed to vote. And moaning about how bad the winner will be, is, or was, is senseless. There will be another election soon enough. For democracy to work, all people need to do is participate. The more they do, the better it works. Participation is the bedrock of democracy, and in democracies we get the governments we deserve.

Celebrity. It is part of the solution to all problems. That and raising awareness. Child starving in Africa? Then better send for Roger Federer, Whoopi Goldberg or the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra… they are all UNICEF Goodwill Ambassadors after all. Want to stop the use of land mines? Send for Princess Diana… except you cannot now, because she is dead. A shame, because plenty of countries still make land mines, including such trivial and unimportant countries as the U.S.A., China and Russia. Apparently she built up a fat dossier on the topic of land mines, and according to her complementary therapist this may have been the reason Di had to die. Yup, making enemies with the British arms industry must be the explanation. That and getting into the back of a car driven at high speed by a drunk. And not putting her seat belt on, as stated in the verdict of the official enquiry. Bullying at your local school? Send for Big Brother halfwit Jade Goody… or maybe not, but she used to be listed amongst the celebrity supporters of the charity Act Against Bullying. Obviously not every charity can call on the same quality of celeb as UNICEF can. Dangerous driving? Send for Eddie Irvine, Dick and Dom or one of the girls in Atomic Kitten. They are supporters of the road safety charity, Brake. Obviously all these celeb campaigners never mix in the same circles, otherwise Eddie Irvine probably should have mentioned the importance of seat belts to Princess Di.

Some people are just greedy for love and attention. It is a fact. Not all are celebrities. Not every celebrity is greedy for love and attention. But it is reasonable to suppose that celebrities may be greedier for love and attention than the rest of us. If the most useful thing you have done in your life is to look good in a dress, then it follows you may want to bump up your usefulness ranking, and hence the amount of love and appreciation you get, by looking good in a dress whilst attending a charity event. All the better if you have time on your hands and no need to do a proper job. Princess Diana, for example, left behind a fortune worth UK£21.5m. In her will, not a penny was given to land mine charities or any other charity. Almost all went to her children, doubtless to protect them from the economic hardships usually associated with being a member of the royal family. She did remember to put her butler in her will, giving UK£50,000 to Paul Burrell. I guess she did not anticipate he was going to make a lucrative career out of exploiting her memory. But there was not a penny to help any of the poor sods who risk life and limb by digging up land mines. Put this into context. Taxpayers paid UK£12.5m for enquiries into how Princess Diana died. UK£12.5m to find out somebody died in a car crash because they did not wear a seatbelt and the car was driven by a drunk. Now put that into context. If you want human life to be dissolved down to some grim numbers, take a look at this report into the cost-benefits of land mine clearance. It states that the annual spend on land mine clearance worldwide peaked in 2004 at US$400m. At the present rate that mines are cleared, the combined value of Princess Diana’s estate and cost of enquiries into her death would have paid for 3 years of mine clearing efforts in Cambodia, which are 98% funded by donors. The report also estimates the value of a human life - in the third world - is US$400,000. It uses a method based on how people value their own lives in developed countries, and hence is more generous than a measure based purely on GDP or income. A purely economic measure may put a life’s worth at US$2,000. According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, there are 2 new casualties from land mines every hour. 40 a day, 1500 a month… and that it is just the reported figure. The actual rate is probably higher still.

I just do not get it when it comes to celebs and charities. Celebs sell magazines, television shows and the rest. Magazines, television and the rest get paid for by advertising and however much the consumer is forced to stump up in subscriptions. If we look at just the UK satellite television provider Sky, in the last financial year they made a UK£499m post-tax profit on the back of UK£4.5bn of revenue. Their profits, alone, are double what the world is spending on clearing landmines. At 31st March 2008, Sky had 8.9m customers, each generating UK£424 of revenue on average. If those subscribers gave just 5% of what they currently spend to be entertained by movie stars, sports stars and the miscellaneous dross of modern celebrity, the annual worldwide spend on land mine clearance would double. Put it another way. The BBC reportedly pays Gary Lineker around UK£500,000 a year to front its football highlights programme, Match of the Day. That means a few hundred hours of an ex-footballer talking about football is worth more than a couple of human lives. David Beckham, another person whose main contribution to life is to kick a ball accurately, is the richest UK sportsman. The greater part of Beckham’s wealth is due to promotional deals with Adidas, Pepsico and a host of other names. Beckham’s picture is used to sell perfume in Tokyo and underwear in New York. The latter deal, with Armani, will secure Beckham a reported US$20m over three years. This advertising power is the same reason why Beckham is also a UNICEF ambassador. That seems to me to be setting the wrong example. Beckham, Goody, Princess Di, even Dick and Dom… they all reflect an obsession with concentrating power, wealth and esteem in the hands of a elite. Want to be successful? Be like Beckham, or Princess Di, irrespective of what the real worth of their accomplishments are. Want to be a failure, at least by the same measures that make the celebs a success? Then spend your life digging up land mines. Nobody will know your name and you will be paid bugger all. If you are good at kicking a ball, or wearing a dress, and use that skill to draw attention to suffering, you can expect excessive wealth, love and praise. That sounds like a much better deal than spending a life doing something about actually alleviating suffering. There is something wrong with a world which distributes its wealth so poorly that there is not enough money to dig up mines but plenty of money available for photos of footballers wearing their undies. If you want to change the world, celebs are not part of the solution. A world which revolves around celebrity is part of the problem.