Think of Costa Rica. What do you associate with this tropical Latin American state? A military dictatorship? Favelas and street kids? Civil war and terrorism? Drug cartels and endemic violence? Political prisoners and extra judicial killings? Greed and corruption? While these problems continue to afflict many Latin American countries tiny Costa Rica is actually a well of stability, democracy, peace and political maturity in the troubled region. Not only a tropical haven but a political paradise; Costa Rica stands as a beacon of hope for the developing world and it could teach the First World a few things too.

Costa Rica is such a surprising country because the history of Latin America stands as an abject lesson in how not to run a country. If every developing country had followed Costa Rica’s path then we would live in a very different world today. In 1900 Argentina was wealthier than Germany with a burgeoning middle class and with their well educated and Europhile populations Brazil, Colombia and Chile had the potential to become prosperous and developed states. Tragically however Latin America, unlike the USA, has never really been able to erase the scars of the colonial era. Perceived injustices festered against the ruling elite and in the 20th century the continent became a Cold War battleground. Conservative forces backed brutal dictatorships and Communist forces backed equally brutal rebel groups. As the continent became ideologically split so to the Latin American economies became increasingly populist and much of the wealth of the early twentieth century was squandered. Although South America has always been one of the most economically unequal continents this was largely as a result of years of imperialism and the turmoil of the Latin Industrial Revolution. If the people had not been exploited by iconoclastic political ideologues then liberal democracies and mixed economies could have quietly alleviated the economic and social inequalities that existed. South America gradually awoke from its violent nightmare during the 1980s and embraced democracy and economic liberalisation. Most major South American states are now democracies with Social Democrat leaders and annual economic growth rates approaching double figures. If this awakening had happened in 1945 then South Americans could conceivably have been enjoying European standards of living today.

Of course there are still those who cling to the iconoclastic, populist ideals that once polarised the continent. Hugo Chavez trumpets himself as the only man battling poverty and imperialism on the continent. Despite the heroic efforts of this one man Venezuela was the only South American country to see its GDP actually shrink between 1999 and 2004. Saved by insanely high oil prices Chavez has broadcast his social welfare programmes to anyone who will listen, although Venezuelans of course don’t have a choice about who they can listen to. Sadly despite this fabulous oil wealth the number of Venezualans living in absolute poverty has actually grown, again no other major South American country as managed this staggering feat. Chavez has failed to give the poor a stake in the economy or improve housing, education or social mobility and unemployment fluctuates between 10 and 20%. When Venezuala’s National Statistics Institute pointed out that poverty had increased by ten points under Chavez, the president (a renowned economist) produced his own study which showed that it had actually decreased by forty points, and I for one believe him. Don’t you?

Chavez’s fortunes are tied to oil prices, and oil currently accounts for 80% of Venezuela’s exports. In the 1950s democratic Venezuela was as rich as France but years of populism have meant that instead of developing into a First World economy Venezuela now finds its future tied to the price of a barrel of oil. As the economist Andrei Illarianov wrote in 2004:

“The “patriotically motivated” economic policy proved devastating as Venezuela slid into its deepest economic crisis. By 2004 its per capita GDP was 37 percent lower than half a century before that. The degrading impact of state command in the economy spread beyond government institutions – it caused the degeneration of Venezuelan society, affecting two generations of people who grew up during state capitalism. Today, Venezuela has no political forces capable of leading it out of the historical deadlock”

As Latin American dictators spent the twentieth century proclaiming their messianic powers and poiltical demagogues tore the continent apart in brutal wars there was one tiny country that quitely got along with electing its leaders, educating its people and slowly building up a functioning economy.

In 1948 Costa Rica got its obligatory civil war out of the way early as Jose Figueres Ferrer swept to power in a bloody coup. But having got rid of an unjust Government Ferrer managed what every other Latin revolutionary has failed to do, he held an election and stood down from power. Since then Costa Rica has had sixty years of unbroken democracy; and it’s not a coincidence that Costa Rica is easily Latin America’s least corrupt country.

Costa Rica’s estimated per capita GDP is $14,000, a respectable ammount for a developing country with few natural resources. By comparison Cuba's per capita GDP is $4,500 and in oil-rich Venezuela it is sill only $6,100. Poverty percentages are as low as in developed countries and the population is as highly urbanised as Finland's. The Government strongly believes in free trade and offers tax incentives for foreign companies investing in the country. The workforce is highly educated and companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, Proctor and Gamble and microchip producer Intel are large scale employers. Rather than selling its rainforests to logging companies Cost Rica has set up huge National Parks and pioneered the idea of eco-tourism, an industy that is now worth some $1.9 billion every year.

Despite being a developing country with few resources Costa Rica has a literacy rate of over 96% which compare favourably with First World countries. It boasts an ethnically diverse population with Jewish, Muslim and Hindu minorities. The country is also a haven for refugees fleeing the death squads and wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Colombia. Costa Rica can also claim lowest crime rate in Latin America. As a mature and free society boasting a vibrant free press Costa Rica also takes its interntional obligations seriously. An active member of the United Nations and the International Court Of Human Rights its only foreign policy objective is the establishment of democracy and human righs in the developing world.

Obviously Costa Rica is still a developing country and life is hard for many. It would also be easy for us to be patronising about the fact that at last one developing country has managed to get its act together; but Costa Rica has shown enough political bravery to shake us out of our complacency. Costa Rica decided to abolish its army in 1948, an idea so fantastic that it seems hundreds of years ahead of its time. Costa Rica has also legalised prostituion and plans to become the world’s first carbon-neutral country by 2021. Can you see any British political party making these ideas central parts of their election manifesto?

Sadly you won’t find Jose Figueres Ferrer’s face on any trendy t-shirts nor will you hear any celebrities eulogising the equality of Costa Rican society. And perhaps that’s for the best, but while we are encouraged to become encouraged to become ethical consumers perhaps we should also become ethical tourists and visit this bastion of peace, democracy and freedom. After all Costa Rica deserves our tourist dollars.

The lush paradise of Cuba was once ruled over by an elderly dictator. Many people disliked this dictator, some even tried to have him killed. Although the dictator had many faults it could be said that under his rule Cuba had the finest healthcare system in Latin America. Indeed during the dictaor's rule Cuba’s healthcare system was better than that of many richer European countries including Britain and France. And this dictator’s name? Fulgencio Batista. Yes that’s right in Batista's Cuba life expectancy indices were only narrowly behind America and Canada and there were more doctors per thousand people than in Great Britain, France and Holland. So why doesn’t anyone lament the passing of Batista? Well perhaps because he was an arrogant, murderous dictator. But that begs the question why do people lament the passing of Castro? He was, after all, an arrogant, murderous dictator.

You could forgive the usual suspects for rallying to the revolutionary cause; Galloway has made a career from supporting Third World dictators and the Manic Street Preachers, well they’re just pop stars. Anyone who has had to listen to a speech by Bono will know that musicians make terrible politicians, although Bono, ironically, is also a terrible musician. But even supposedly respectable politicians have been queuing up to shed a tear at Castro’s passing. Harriet Harman went as far as to say that he was a ‘Hero of the Left’. A slightly baffling remark since Trade Unions are banned in Cuba, but perhaps the workers’ lives are so perfect that they don’t require them.

So what is it that makes sane people go all misty eyed about Castro? Maybe it's his love of fine Cuban cigars, his funkily retro army fatigues, his trademark beard, his childish belligerance towards America, the comical attempts on his life or maybe his famously long speeches – ‘Oh Fidel not another eight hour speech about the revolution – What are you like?’ And so on.

And then there’s the Teflon coated myth of the Cuban health service. Never mind the fact that Cuba had had a world class health service for decades before the revolution, or that every single European country managed to set up universal health care systems without the need for fifty year dictatorships, mass executions or the destruction of the economy. Completely forget about the fact that Cuba’s healthcare system is worse now, relative to the rest of the world, than it was in 1957. And of course ignore the reports from Cubans about the terrible problems with the system or the fact that Communist Officials and dollar touting tourists obtain better treatment than ordinary Cubans.

No-one should isolise Mussolini because he made the trains run on time or Hitler because he ended Germany’s economic depression or Stalin because he led the industrialisation of Russia, so why should Castro be any different? After all the Castro regime is responsible for the torture and execution of between 5000 and 35,000 political prisoners. Tens of thousands of political prisoners still languish in Cuba’s prisons. Nobody knows exactly how many because Cuba is one of only a few countries to ban such fascist organisations as the International Red Cross and Amnesty International.

So what do ordinary Cubans think of Castro’s Cuba? Well we don’t really know that either because free speech is banned, the media is controlled by the state and foreign reporters are strictly monitored. Nor are Cubans allowed to hold meetings or rallies, own property, conduct private business, belong to trade unions, move around their own country, move house or, until recently, freely choose their sexuality. Cubans are also banned from leaving their country for the quite sensible reason that no-one would come back. Indeed tens of thousands of Cubans have been executed, drowned or imprisoned after trying to escape to Florida on rafts and dinghies. Around one and a half million Cubans have managed to flee their homeland since 1959, many settling in thriving expatriate community in Miami, to the great benefit of the United States. It is estimated that at least 5 million Cubans have attempted to flee the country since 1959.

Of course dictators rarely restrict misery to their own citizens. Castro has sponsored terrorist campaigns in many Latin American and African countries leading to inevitable war and strife. The man even supported an unprovoked nuclear first strike on the U.S. and he brought the world to the brink of the apocalypse with the placement on Cuban soil of nuclear weapons aimed at Washington.

In 1959 Cuba was a relatively wealthy country with massive economic potential. With a few simple reforms the workers of Cuba could have been as rich as their counterparts in Europe and America. Indeed once poor island states such as Ireland and Iceland now have a GDP greater than that of the USA. Today however Cuba’s economy is judged to be one of the least free in the world, slightly behind North Korea. And that for me is the great tragedy for Cuba; that so much potential wealth, creativity and freedom was destroyed by one man’s arrogance and brutality.

Inevitably Castro's great Communist experiment collapsed and failed like every other centrally planned economy in world history; but for Castro to admit to his mistake would naturally be unthinkable. Instead, desperate for American dollars, he opened Cuba’s pristine beaches up to hordes of Yanquis tourists. Of course ordinary Cubans are banned from these luxurious resorts in their own country, it seems they just don’t have enough dollars for Fidel. However he was kind enough to let one group of citizens in, the armies of jineteras, or prostitutes, are cynically exploited to attract tourists and solve the Government’s economic crisis. So, irony of ironies, we are back where we started. When Castro swept Batista from power he promised to banish the hookers and Yanquis tourists bringing shame to the great Cuban nation. Today, when we survey the poverty stricken prostitutes plying their hapless trade on Cuba’s golden beaches, we are reminded of the final scene from George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

“The creatures look from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Question Time has to be one of the most annoying programmes on television, although perhaps still slightly more tolerable than an episode of Jeremy Kyle. Every week we are treated to a litany of bland politicians towing their bland party lines, plus a series of ‘free thinkers’ usually on the hard left or hard right to balance the insanity. Playing to the audience like a troupe from the Royal Shakespeare Company participants herald such platitudes as ‘We created bin Laden so we should be bombing ourselves’ or ‘The Afghans were better off under the Taliban’, that one even more depressing because it came from a teenage girl, oh the irony. Quite often we are implored to ‘Think of the children’, whatever that means. Perhaps the apogee of this depressingly anti-intellectual trend is the ever popular catchphrase ‘It’s just like 1984, this is’ You can imagine the round of applause that usually gets from the suitably earnest audiences.

Presumably this idea has something to do with the fact that we have more CCTV cameras than anywhere else in the world. Unless I missed a fairly crucial edition of The Times, I wasn’t aware of the outbreak of World War Three or that the state was forcing us to do callisthenics every morning via our TVs. Although Mr Motivator’s strange success in the 1990s may indeed have been a sinister Fascist experiment. In fact I don’t remember a chapter in 1984 whereby members of the proletariat were able to have a rather hilarious punch-up with the Deputy Prime Minister and get away with it. Maybe that bit just didn’t make the final edit.

We are constantly warned that we are living in a ‘Surveillance Society’, (cue unsettling music), but isn’t that a good thing? After all we are always urged to ‘look out’ for each other, isn’t the CCTV system just a really efficient version of Neighbourhood Watch without the twitching curtains and the gossip? Anyway we can’t rely on the pensioners to keep an eye out anymore because they’re all watching Jeremy Kyle. And does anyone really think that the Government employs armies of sinister agents to track our every routine lives as we do our weekly shop at Tesco’s and drive the kids to school? They’d probably fall asleep on the job through sheer boredom. Granted MPs may employ lots of utterly useless people, including themselves, but I think there’s a limit to their largesse. No-one actually watches the CCTV tapes, apart from the occasional pervy security guard. But since when did pervy security guards threaten Western democracy?

In fact virtually the only time these tapes are watched is when they provide evidence for a serious criminal investigation. CCTV footage has been used to solve virtually every type of vicious crime from rape and murder to armed robbery. Without CCTV footage Crimewatch would have to rely on those crappy artists impressions; incidentally is it me or can you automatically spot a sex pest from their terrible choice of glasses combined with scary facial hair? More recently CCTV footage was instrumental in the investigation into the attempted 21/7 attacks.

In fact I would press for more information being held by the police. This week two extremely dangerous criminals were convicted due to the fact that the police held their DNA on a database system. However the police only held their DNA by chance and both dangerous men had the opportunity to commit more crimes before they were caught. If everyone in the country was made to contribute to the DNA database, with ample safety measures, then the police would be able to do their job a lot faster and we would all be a lot safer. Our medical and dental records are already on file so why not our DNA? And what if our DNA somehow fell into the wrong hands, what are people going to do, clone us? Rather depressingly European judges are planning to order our police to destroy 500,000 DNA samples on ‘privacy’ grounds. By that logic I could stop dentists from holding my dental records, doctors from holding my medical records and banks from holding my account numbers.

As long as there are sufficient safeguards there is nothing wrong with public bodies holding some of our private details. We live in a democracy and we are protected from the Government by the law. How many cases of identity theft involving publicly held information have there been? My guess is not many, apart from the sniper in The Day Of The Jackal. Yes those two cds were lost in the post but has anyone actually lost any money as a result? In any case that problem was simply the result of lax security measures, not a particularly hard thing to fix when you consider banks handle billions of pounds of cash without loosing any. When people moan about living in a ‘surveillance society’ it’s a bit like when people say we have a ‘Third World health service’. The fact is that most of the world has no access to healthcare and millions of people live in societies that are as cruel as Orwell’s Airstrip One.

China’s one billion citizens are constantly brainwashed into accepting that ‘The Party’ is ruling for the good of the people. Just to make sure that people have fully understand the message they employ thousands of agents to monitor what people are saying on internet blogs and chatrooms. People who don’t quite understand how good The Party are to them are taken away for ‘re-education’. Of course some pesky citizens refuse to believe the truth and they are shot or thrown in prison; all for the good of the ordinary people of course. Rumours that the party is massively corrupt or that it committed mass murder and destroyed the economy are of course spread by agents of ‘The Enemy’.

Several Islamic regimes also rule societies which are incredibly similar to Airstrip One. In Saudi Arabia Wahhabism is the only religious, political, social or cultural belief you are allowed to have. Saudi TV is all about what the local Sheikh did today, (Saudi Jeremy Kyle ends with a live stoning), religious police enforce the strict religious laws and the movement of citizens is rigidly controlled. At this very moment a Saudi woman faces public beheading because she had a coffee with a male colleague at the local Starbucks. Even Orwell at his bleakest could not have created a more depressing story. Iran is a society just as rigidly controlled as Saudi. They buy into the whole 1984 thing even more as Terhan is dotted with murals reminding the citizens they are in a state of war with the Great Satan, Eurasia, I mean the USA. The Iranian regime even bans access to Facebook, can you believe that kids? Oh won’t somebody please think of the children??!! And I’ve not even mentioned North Korea the 1984 nightmare as imagined by Orwell alive and well in the 21st century.

You see that’s the really sad thing about these people on Question Time. If they aren’t pulling the party line they are so full of self loathing and self obsession that they can only string a sentence together to kick their own country. Yet millions of people across the world toil under the oppression of true totalitarian regimes. And these aren’t just regimes that control freedom of movement or freedom of speech. The most powerful point in 1984 was that regimes can control the minds of the people and influence what they think. If Orwell was alive today he would no doubt be reporting the loss of free thought in Iran, Saudi Arabia and North Korea. It is these problems that we should be concerned about not what a PC may or may not be doing with our DNA.

Campaigning for the Labour Party in the 1980s a young Tony Blair was vociferous in his opposition to the use of a nuclear deterrent. As Prime Minister in 2006 he announced that giving up nuclear weapons today would be “Unwise and dangerous.”

He was wrong in the 1980s and he is wrong today. The original rationale for Mutually Assured Destruction was sound and almost certainly stopped the Cold War from turning extremely hot. But while we have stopped fighting the Soviets New Labour are still fighting Thatcher. Blair’s decision to replace Trident probably had as much to do with projecting an image of strength as it did with his stated defence rationale.

And what exactly is that rationale? That in this world of unknowable and amorphous threats the nuclear arsenal is our ultimate insurance policy. It’s an idea that sounds reasonable except that we can actually estimate where the next threat will come from and our ultimate insurance policy is, as it always will be, the United States.

The world has changed since the 1980s and Tony Blair is right that we do now face new and difficult threats. Russia may be throwing its weight around but its new found confidence is only a result of record oil and gas prices. Its economy is still unproductive, its population is shrinking and the Russian leadership are as aware as anyone that they cannot afford a confrontation with the West. So where might a nuclear threat to the U.K. come from? The most widely touted source would be a nuclear armed Iran. The Iranian regime has had a fairly sophisticated nuclear weapons programme for some time but it is still a long way from manufacturing a deployable warhead; the CIA aren’t even sure that the Iranian weapons programme is still active. Furthermore even if the Iranians did manage to produce a nuclear warhead it would take a huge technological leap to produce a delivery system capable of reaching London. But let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that Iran was able to produce a long range nuclear missile; the mere announcement of this fact would probably lead to imediate air-strikes by America. Even if the U.S. did not strike Iran then Israel certainly would. Perhaps this strike would fail; but then how would that lead to the Iranians nuking London? A nuclear strike on a major NATO ally would in any case inevitably mean a massive and total U.S. retaliation. This point would not be lost on the Iranian leadership and for all their belief in the apocalypse they have so far shown an unwillingness to provoke it ahead of time. Even if the U.S. did not retaliate, which would be fantastical idea, the U.K. would always need U.S. permission to retaliate with a nuclear strike. So the presence of a retaliatory nuclear arsenal is entirely irrelevant to what is supposedly the U.K.’s most pressing nuclear threat.

There are of course other nuclear armed states but it is unthinkable that any of them would ever even consider attempting to flatten the U.K. Pakistan is easily the most unstable nuclear armed country but even her arsenal is safe under lock and key with the country’s formidable army. Pakistan like any country has no desire to provoke an apocalyptic U.S. response. It is true there are Islamists who would dearly love to get their hands on the nuclear arsenal but the likelihood of them taking power in Pakistan is effectively zero. Even if the unthinkable did happen the U.S. has emergency procedures in place to cover such a scenario.

Nuclear proliferation amongst so-called rogue states remains a major problem. Indeed Libya and North Korea were sufficiently unworried about the U.K’s current arsenal to pursue their own weapons programmes. For North Korea it seems to have been a cry for attention as much as anything else and Libya’s programme was successfully ended through old-school diplomacy and spy craft. The way to counter proliferation is with old fashioned carrot and stick diplomacy, rather than a standing arsenal.

The one group that may conceivably be willing to use nuclear weapons against us would be a terrorist organisation. But a nuclear terrorist attack is also probably the most unlikely scenario of all. For a start even using all the resources of a nation state and knowledge and technology borrowed from the West it is very, very difficult to develop a nuclear weapon. For a disparate terrorist group it would be nigh on impossible. Furthermore the logistics of assembly, transportation and detonation mean that such a plot would almost be guaranteed to fail. We know that Bin Laden expressed interest in acquiring nuclear weapons but that the idea never progressed past the enquiry stage, we also know that even fanatical Al Qaeda members have expressed doubts about the morality of nuclear terrorism. 9/11 itself was immensely controversial and, but for Bush’s over-reaction, would have been a tactical failure for Bin Laden. The most pressing question about a nuclear terrorist strike would be ‘Who are we going retaliate against?’. Terrorist groups don’t tend to have capital cities or headquarters, nor do they like to leave proof of their activities. Would the U.K. seriously consider annihilating millions of people on the basis of a hunch that a terrorist may have based himself in their country? In announcing the extension of the Trident programme Blair argued that the biggest danger to the U.K. lay in the danger of a rogue state aiding a terrorist group. But in the event of a nuclear strike how would the U.K. obtain proof of this? And does anyone seriously believe that the U.K. would flatten a country because its unelected Government may or may not have had links with a terrorist group? I doubt it and once the fear of Mutually Assured Destruction has disappeared then a nuclear arsenal really has very little use.

The U.K. does face a very real threat today far more dangerous than a hypothetical nuclear threat twenty years from now. It’s a threat that comes from its own citizens and a twenty billion pound nuclear arsenal does not protect against suicide bombers who make their weapons from chapatti flour in the kitchen of a council house. When MI5, MI6 and anti-terrorist police are crying out for extra funds it is criminally negligent to spend billions of pounds on a deterrent to a threat that does not and will not exist.

Furthermore if we did need to retaliate using a nuclear arsenal then it will have failed in its only purpose. It is an extremely flimsy insurance contract and a reactive rather then pro-active form of defence. The rogue states and terrorist groups do not conduct their activities at Faslane naval base. In order to stop nuclear proliferation we are going to have to use our intelligence service and our armed forces in difficult parts of the world. The British Army is already engaged in the former Al Qaeda stronghold of Helmand; it is likely to remain there for several more decades and to have participate in further expeditionary warfare in the same part of the world. And it is woefully under equipped. Here is the real lynchpin of the argument against Trident; British troops are a far more useful in ensuring our safety and we are failing them miserably due to a chronic lack of funding. The cost of Trident is estimated to be an incredible £15-20 billion plus up to £2 billion a year running costs. When British troops are dying due to a lack of body armour or being outgunned by peasants with Kalashnikovs then that is an absolute disgrace.

Just imagine what those billions could buy for our armed forces: medium and heavy lift helicopters, ground-attack aircraft, attack helicopters, transport aircraft, surveillance aircraft, IED resistant vehicles, mobile firing platforms, Minimi machine guns, under-slung grenade launchers, heavy machine guns, body armour, night-vision goggles and surveillance drones not to mention higher pay, better accommodation and more recruits. That would make a real difference to our security and to spend money on nuclear weapons while our troops are dying is insane and criminal.

Nor would the U.K. have to give up its place at the Security Council if it decommissioned its weapons. It has one of only three deep water navies in the world and it spends more on its armed forces than anyone else apart from the U.S. Furthermore it is a responsible democracy engaged in peacekeeping operations in dozens of theatres across the world.

Getting rid of Trident doesn’t even mean loosing our nuclear deterrent. The NATO treaty regards an attack on a member country as an attack on all members. It is inconceivable that America would not guarantee our freedom in the face of a nuclear threat. We could even formalise this pact by allowing America to use British bases to install the star wars defence shield. Furthermore we actually have more leverage over U.S. policy than is often realised; America has been chastised by the Iraq tragedy and unilateralism has been discarded. In short the U.S. needs its allies and it will protect them. America also needs its U.K. staging bases and the British owned island of Diego Garcia to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wouldn’t be to difficult to give a few basing rights in return for the U.S. publicly guaranteeing retaliation in the event of a nuclear attack on Britain. America would surely more than happy to oblige one of its most important allies. And the price of this arrangement? A handshake with our guarantor.

Christians: a few questions. Why did God create the universe in a billionth of a second and then wait eight billion years to create the earth? After creating the earth why did he wait a further four and a half billion years before creating Adam and Eve? Why did God create Neanderthals and then get rid of them? Why did God create mosquitoes and malaria? If God is omnipotent then why did He bother to create the laws governing the universe – why not just click his fingers? Why were we told that we couldn’t and then that we could eat pork? If Jesus helped the outcasts of society why does the Church discriminate against gays? If it is so hard for rich men to enter heaven why does the Archbishop of Canterbury get paid seventy grand a year? Why did God smite Sodom and Gomorra but bless Benidorm with endless sunshine? What was the point of the dinosaurs? Why do you believe that the Bible is the word of God but the Koran isn’t? Is the universe just a big Hornby set for God to play with and how egotistical is that? If God is perfect how is it possible for Him to feel wrath, surely that’s a sign of fallibility and a sin? Is it possible to disagree with God about sex before marriage? Why would the devil torture evil people when he’s evil himself? Why are certain people saved by miracles but millions allowed to die in genocides? If abortion is immoral then why does God cause miscarriages? Why do we need a church or a priest to allow us to live as a Christian? You say the universe is perfect because it was designed by God but galaxies collide, stars explode, species die out, and people are born with disabilities, discuss.

As you may have guessed I don’t believe that God exists despite spending twelve years at Catholic school. Perhaps they educated me a bit too well, though I did pass GCSE Religious Studies so if I’m wrong at least it shows that God has a sense of humour.

Now I haven’t read the recent diatribes against religion by messers Dawkins and Hitchens but I like to think that what I just said sums up the case for atheism without needing to waffle on for the next four hundred pages. I also happen to slightly disagree with their argument that religion is universally bad and that people should be encouraged to convert to atheism. Dawkins himself seemed to backtrack a little when he described himself as “Culturally Christian.” Nor do I believe that religion has been the cause of nearly all wars; surely that has been greed and the quest for power and resources. Incidentally though, Hitler was not an atheist and did at one point claim to be doing “God’s work”. Certainly the Nazis were aided and abetted by the leadership of the Catholic Church

Christianity like Confucianism or the work of Proust is essentially a philosophy to help one through life and ít provides spiritual comfort for millions across the world. Few other philosophies help so many humans through the uncertainty, the hardship and the grief that life can bring. Although I am an atheist I do feel that a critical exposure to religion can help foster a sense of moral duty in life. Many of Jesus’ parables speak of the need to help others and the importance of holding values throughout one's life. And it’s not just Christianity that has merit. The story of the Buddha is a fascinating tale of the need for spiritual well-being and meditation. It is also easy to understand the appeal of Islam, especially in agrarian societies. Mohammed preached the importance of an ascetic life and the equality and humbleness of Islam is appealing to people who may have few possessions and no political rights. If Christopher Hitchens had been brought up in Soweto or Rio de Janeiro with a life-expectancy in the low-thirties and friends dying all around I suspect that he, like I, would be in the front row of church every Sunday. Indeed for the eighteen hundred years leading up to the industrial revolution Christianity provided a lifeline from the grinding hardship of daily life. Today capitalism and democracy bring freedom and prosperity but neither can guarantee happiness. Furthermore it is impossible to tell people what they may and may not believe without becoming totalitarian.

If everybody subscribed to the liberal ideal of following their own God in the privacy of their own house then we wouldn’t have a problem. The trouble with the religious is that they usually believe their own hype. The established Church in England likes to cast its votes in the House of Lords and fights tooth and nail to have its say in virtually everything. Whether it is our sexuality, the way we spend a Sunday, our choice of school or what we like to watch at the cinema the Church likes to tell us what to do, sometimes successfully. This is the true danger of religion.

In the West we are fortunate that Christianity has been forced into a rearguard action. It started with Copernicus and then Galileo casting doubt on aspects of the Church’s teaching. At first this was easily solved with a bit of summary imprisonment but with the Reformation and the Enlightenment the power of critical thought eventually triumphed over religious dogma. The rise in living standards and the arrival of political freedom in Europe meant the masses suddenly weren’t so downtrodden and the Church lost its key target audience. Countries like France and the U.S.A. managed to formally abolish the link between church and state while Britain has muddled on through. Which brings us back to the present; the Church is on the ropes in Europe and if people choose to believe today then it is their free choice and I respect that. If we can find a politician brave enough then we might even be able to break the link between the church and state in our own country and religion will truly be a private affair.

The Enlightenment was, I’m afraid to say, a fairly European affair and virtually every cultural, technological, scientific and philosophical breakthrough of the last five hundred years has been made in the West. In Northern Europe polls often indicate that around 50% of the population are agnostic or atheist. In parts of the Middle East it would be difficult to openly conduct that poll. At one point the Middle East was wealthier and more advanced than Europe but there is evidence that the lack of an Islamic Enlightenment allowed Europe to leap ahead. By the 13th century the creative output of the Islamic World had stagnated and the Mongol invasions devastated the centres of learning. Critical thought does not seem to have re-developed since that period and the Arab World currently translates fewer books each year than Spain has in the last one thousand years. This may be due to the literalist and all-encompassing nature of Islam. Indeed in the Gulf States religious education is valued above all else; Saudi Arabia has ranks of highly qualified religious students who are of no meaningful use to their society. In Pakistan Madrassa students are made to learn the Koran by rote, surely the antithesis of critical thought. But it is up to Muslims to decide the place of religion in their societies. Secular democracy is a form of negative freedom and a universal right, but to try and implement it ourselves is morally dubious and hypocritical, especially considering the Church of England still sits in the House of Lords.

So that’s what Catholic School taught me then; Jesus had some good views about helping lepers but he almost certainly wasn’t the Son Of God and if he turned up today he’d probably be sectioned. Slightly blasphemous but there you go; if you don’t like what I say then by all means pray for my soul, I may need it after this.

I believe in your right to believe in [a] God. Just don’t tell me what I need to believe.

Multiculturalism is dead. The premise that all cultures and societies are equally advanced and equally virtuous is a fallacy. If it were true then in Britain today the state would officially endorse forced female circumcision, ‘honour’ killings, forced marriage, ritual sacrifice, witchcraft, and execution for apostasy, adultery and homosexuality. Ergo the idea that all cultural practices should be cherished equally is defunct.

The philosophy of multiculturalism grew as a result of one of the greatest unplanned migrations of human beings in history, the emigration of hundreds of thousands of former colonial subjects to Europe between 1945 and the end of the 1970s. In response to the discrimination suffered by these immigrants the Government responded with the admirable Race Relations Acts outlawing discrimination on the grounds of race. This legislation protects British citizens against racial discrimination to an extant that is still not available in France or indeed many countries of the world.

Despite the legislation passed in the 1970s the racist behaviour that continued to be perpetrated by a minority of British society has had a huge impact on the approaches taken to the integration of Britain’s minority communities. The high profile race riots of the early 80s, the football hooliganism epidemic of the same decade and the highly publicised cases of institutionalised racism, culminating in the MacPherson report, led to a general belief that any criticism of a minority community was nothing short of naked racism. By the 1990s there existed a culture of puritanical self censorship in relation to Britain’s minority communities. Everyone has heard the stories of zealous local councils banning Christmas decorations, the banning of representations of pigs or other ‘offensive’ items and the millions of pounds that are spent translating information into Urdu, Hindi and the myriad of other languages emanating from the Indian sub-continent.

Multiculturalism exploded out of this mindset, which by the 1990s pervaded every level of bureaucracy from the village hall to Whitehall. The fundamental precepts of the British state, the individual’s right to freedom of religion and freedom of speech which already allowed communities to peacefully co-exist were deemed insufficient. Thus the differences between communities were to be cherished; the religious sensibilities of citizens could overpower the secular laws of the state. The law exempting Sikhs from wearing motorcycle helmets was the thin end of the wedge.

Multiculturalism is a noble idea with brave aims. It aspired to bring an end to the petty racism that scarred elements of British society and to bring sometimes disparate communities together for the benefit of a peaceful and harmonious state. To some extant it has been successful in dealing with effect of unplanned mass migration from non-European cultures. Racist discrimination in Britain while not extinct is, perhaps, relatively negligible. Furthermore British people are integrated, to various degrees, with the different religious and ethnic communities that populate their towns and cities and Britain has one of the highest rates of inter-racial marriage in the world. It can certainly be said that the benign aspects of multiculturalism such as cuisine, fashion and music have helped to improve Britain’s national culture and society.

The scar afflicting British society is no longer racism; it is separation, ghettoisation and the surrender of national values and principles. The confusion between racism and multiculturalism has led to significant developments in British society which have been blithely accepted by citizens and politicians alike. Apart from the odd world cup there is little celebration of a national culture in Britain today. For a country that bequeathed the world industrialisation, the works of Shakespeare, Newton and Darwin, the television, the computer and the internet, amongst much else, there often seems little to celebrate. Aside from sporting events celebrations of national culture are muted, perhaps even frowned upon. Perhaps the end of nationalism is a good thing, after all aggressive nationalism cost millions of lives in the last century and maybe its demise is the natural progression of the post-industrial state. However we seem to be loosing sight of the fundamental basics of our society; personal freedom, tolerance and respect for the rule of law that have allowed almost one thousand years of prosperity and progress. Perhaps we have forgotten how far this country has come.

Since 1492 Western Europe has experienced the Renaissance, the Reformation, The Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the Social Revolution of the twentieth century. In five hundred years the power of the church over people’s lives has been broken. Science and rationalism have debunked many of the church’s teachings and led to a rapid transformation of industry, science, healthcare and leisure. Thanks to the hardships of their ancestors over the recent centuries Europeans have reasonable control over their own lives; they are well educated and they have built tolerant, egalitarian and almost meritocratic democracies. A country such as, say, Saudi Arabia has experienced none of these things. Isolated from the West until the 1930s this is a country that did not experience any social development from the middle ages until the oil bonanza of the latter part of the twentieth century. It is a country that was parachuted into the twentieth century without the hardship and the turmoil that social revolution and industrialisation entail. It is a country dominated by an autocratic and feudal ruling class, a country in which religion controls the lives and the minds of its people, a country in which women and infidels are treated as inferior, a country in which freedom of speech, freedom of movement and the rule of civil law are unknowns. In short it is a society comparable to that of Western Europe, circa 1100 AD. I use the example of Saudi Arabia for two reasons; firstly it illustrates the fact that while all human beings are born equal the societies in which they live advance at different rates. Secondly the oil wealth this society has inherited has been used to spread its messages of hatred and intolerance to the mosques and madrassas of Western Europe. Despite the lack of official acknowledgement it is abundantly clear today that is the rise of Islamism that shatters the myth of the promised multicultural paradise

In September 2007 the West Midlands police turned a blind eye to evidence of racism and solicitation to murder occurring amongst Islamists in Birmingham. Appropriately enough for an institution chastised by the multiculturalism debate the Chief Commissioner of the force even went so for as to accuse the reporters of the crime of racism. Earlier in the year Sir Ian Blair, the Chief Commissioner of the Met, took part in a ceremony for police cadets. One female Muslim cadet refused to shake his hands stating that her religion forbade her from touching a male to whom she was not related. Apparently no one questioned whether this would allow her to carry out her duties for male members of the public. In October Muslim employees of Sainsbury’s were allowed to defer the sale of alcohol to their non-Muslim colleagues. A Muslim employee of Boots the chemists was allowed to refuse the sale of the morning after pill on religious grounds. The General Medical Council has since admitted that some Muslim students had refused to attend lectures on STDs and the effects of alcohol.

These recent examples show how far our Muslim youths have become indoctrinated by a Salafist Wahabbi strain of Islam that has replaced the Sufism of their parents. Islam is not the only culture to clash with 21st century British society but it is the inexorable rise of Wahabbist Islam that has exposed the great failing of multiculturalism. In the last ten years Britain has produced more suicide bombers than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq ever did. The laissez fayre attitude of our multicultural leaders has meant that for the last twenty years Saudi inspired Wahabbi preachers have been allowed to preach their messages of hate unmolested and sometimes even abetted by the state. Messages of tolerance and the importance of 21st century values have failed to reach the ears of our Muslim youth. It is also abundantly clear that multiculturalism has strengthened the divide between Britain’s religious communities. Some Muslim communities such as Tower Hamlets and Dewsbury have turned away from mainstream society, their youth clubs are dominated Deobondi groups and their residents rarely mix with outsiders. Saville Town in Dewsbury is some 97% Muslim. This creeping ghettoisation is compounded by the rise of Whabbist faith schools which by their very nature discriminate against children on the basis of their religion. The medieval attitudes of Saudi society show a worrying predominance in the mindset of our Muslim youths. Some 36% of young British Muslims believe in the death penalty for apostasy, polls also routinely suggest that around 25% of British Muslims support the 7th July mass murders. These are not quaint cultural quirks they are sickening, dangerous and a damning indictment of the failure of multiculturalism. British society will not only pay the price in terms of social conflict but also in the spectre of terrorism, on a monthly basis small groups of British Islamist youths are tried and convicted of committing terrorist offences in the UK. Who knows how far the medieval doctrine of Islamism has buried itself in the soul of British Islam?

How then do we end the creeping radicalisation of our Muslim youth and the deepening separation in our towns and cities? How do we create a society in which the right to freedom of religion is respected but the laws of the state are safeguarded and society is well integrated and united?

Only by espousing the fundamental values of a post-industrial society can we prosper. Freedom to choose religion, sexuality, political views and freedom of speech are fundamental human values. They are not the exclusive right of the West. It is simply the fact that Western society has developed exponentially over the last five hundred years and left pre-industrial societies in its wake. It is often difficult to believe that until relatively recently we shared many of the cultural traits of less enlightened societies. For example just one hundred years ago public kissing was illegal in Paris, homosexuality was only repealed in Britain in the 1960s and the introduction of capital punishment for adultery was only narrowly avoided in Victorian Britain. It is time to take pride in the achievements of our country and to give a helping hand to people who are struggling to escape the suffocation of pre-industrial societies.

To be loosing the war of ideas with Whabbist fundamentalists in 21st century Britain is inexcusable; all it requires is plenty of backbone and a little organisation. First of all we must find a Government that is brave enough to bring an end to faith schools. Religious education is not the responsibility of the state and religious schools usually only thrive in countries such as Pakistan, in which the Government has failed in its educational obligations. Furthermore the religious syllabuses of these schools encourage separation from society on a religious basis. The use of Saudi textbooks that promote the supremacy of Islam is a worrying trend in modern Britain; multicultural Salafism is not.

If we do not loose our Muslim youths in our schools then they our lost in our mosques and madrassas. The rhetoric of Salafist firebrands is easily countered by imams who are educated both in the Quran and the 21st century society. Surely it is not beyond the wit of the Government to encourage the rise of moderate imams while deporting foreign citizens who encourage terrorism, race-hate and murder. Even Saudi Arabia, the homeland of extremism, has had great success in re-educating Al Qaeda convicts and spreading the preaching of moderate imams. In Islamic countries with Sufi traditions, such as Jordan and Turkey, many practicing female Muslims leave their hair uncovered and the Niqab is virtually unheard of. Such an enlightened approach to Islam is sadly unthinkable on the streets of Tower Hamlets today.

Most importantly our political leaders need to stress the fundamental values of British society and never back down in the face of opposition. Female circumcision, ‘honour’ killings, forced marriage, ritual sacrifice, witchcraft, and execution for apostasy, adultery and homosexuality are despicable crimes and our country should lead the fight against them. We can offer our citizens everything; peace, security, freedom to worship, a stake in society but citizens must also understand their own responsibilities.

If it comes to a battle of values we cannot loose unless we choose to. Al Qaeda can never offer people anything other than death, destruction and hatred; every terrorist atrocity is a propaganda defeat for its perpetrators. In order to succeed we must offer the hand of friendship to our lost generation of Muslims and ensure that their children are brought up to know that they are lucky to be a Muslim in 21st century Britain.

The decision to invade Iraq was undoubtedly a strategic mistake, morally dubious and incredibly costly in terms of blood and treasure. However there is still an opportunity for the U.S. to salvage a tactical victory from the wreckage of a shattered project. The initial grand visions for the Iraq project have rightly been consigned to the dustbin of history. Iraq was not a threat to Western interests, Saddam never had any contact with Bin Laden and indeed the war sparked a truly international Jihad just as Al Qaeda seemed to be on the ropes. The central premise of the war, that democracies stifle terrorism, was always a fallacy; democratic Britain has produced far more suicide bombers than Saddam’s Iraq ever did. Indeed with the bombing of the Samarra mosque and near civil war in 2006 it seemed as if the U.S. might be on the brink of a strategic humiliation in the Land of the Two Rivers. Iraq was poised to destroy itself in internecine warfare, Al Qaeda had announced the founding of its Caliphate in Anbar and the Baker-Hamilton report endorsed the strategic drawdown of U.S. troops. If the U.S. had lost its nerve during that nightmarish summer then there can be little doubt that Iraq would have descended into the kind of bloodshed not seen since the Rwandan genocide.

Instead Iraq may have been saved by the same man who initiated its catastrophe. It was Bush’s stubbornness and unassailable self-belief that led him into Iraq and it was those same features that enabled him to ignore the clamour for a withdrawal and instead send more U.S. troops into the Mesopotamian meat-grinder. To have drawn down U.S. forces in 2006 would surely have allowed Al Qaeda to claim that they had defeated the superpower as they did in Somalia and Afghanistan. The effect of this on a generation of impressionable, young Muslims across the world can be easily imagined. Furthermore without a force to separate the warring Sunni and Shia, Iraq had the very real potential to collapse into the same open warfare that tore apart the Balkans in the 1990s. This was the nadir of the Iraq project; suicide bombs killed Shia by the dozen, Shia militias killed Sunnis by the hundred. Caught in between the two, the U.S. was fighting a bloody, seemingly un-winnable war against the fanatical Al Qaeda terrorists who had plunged the country into chaos. The depressing spectre of Vietnam had raised its head over the American psyche and all seemed lost. During the Vietnam War Congress, faced with a bloody, far-away war lost its nerve and withdrew funding to the South Vietnamese Government; causing its inevitable collapse and a victory for the Communist North. Though he often seems wilfully ignorant of politcal history Bush had at least learned one lesson from the defeat in Vietnam, namely that for an insurgency to succeed it must win the battle for public opinion. The Vietcong achieved this when in 1975 U.S. resolve crumbled under public pressure. For all his faults, and they are many, Bush at least had the strength to stand up for his own beliefs even when all around were counselling otherwise. By authorising the surge of U.S. troops he may very well have turned what could have been an unmitigated disaster into a tactical victory.

Under the command of counter-insurgency expert, General Petraeus, the U.S. poured thousands more of its troops into Iraq at the end of 2006. Contrary to popular belief the bloodshed in Iraq was not being caused by the U.S. presence, Iraq Body Count estimates that U.S. troops were directly responsible for around 1.6% of all violent deaths in 2007. Virtually all the violence was being caused by Al Qaeda, the Ba’athists, Shia militias and criminal gangs. All of these groups stood to increase their activities in the event of a U.S. withdrawal. While the surge led to an increase in the number of civilians killed by U.S. forces the pressure applied to the terrorist groups led to a reduction of the overall number of violent deaths in Iraq over a 12 month period. These results provide a final refutation of the idea that the violence in Iraq is caused by U.S. troops. If this was so how could an extra 30,000 U.S. troops lead to a massive decrease in civilian deaths? The U.S. has also begun to develop more sophisticated tactics to contain the insurgency under the expert guidance of General Petraeus. Furthermore it was also becoming clear that while Al Qaeda operatives may have been well versed in the Hadith they had clearly spent less time reading insurgency manuals. The massive suicide bombs against innocent civilians had long provoked disquiet amongst nationalist Sunni insurgents; when Al Qaeda began to take over Iraqi provinces to proclaim their Caliphate they essentially shot themselves in the foot. The idea of a pan-Islamic Caliphate is Al Qaeda’s ultimate goal and its failure in Iraq has been a devastating blow to the organisation. Al Qaeda operatives began to force their way of life on ordinary Iraqis through torture and summary execution. The Sunnis of Anbar and Baghdad, perhaps the most westernised of Iraqis, began to rebel against this new form of totalitarian rule. This development serves as a glimpse of why Al Qaeda can never achieve its goals. Western society allows people to choose their lifestyle; Islamism like Communism tells people how to live, by force if necessary. In 2007 the Sunni nationalists began to force Al Qaeda out of Anbar and finally realised that four years of insurgency had done more to destroy their country than the temporary humiliation of a foreign occupation. The U.S. has been quick to jump on this development and drafted former Sunni insurgents into Awakening Councils to fight the foreign Al Qaeda fighters. As a result the Pentagon is now debating whether to allow soldiers to take off their body armour on patrol in Anbar, once the graveyard of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Undoubtedly Iraq is still an exceptionally violent country and it has taken an unjustifiable amount of blood and treasure to reach even this precarious position. However in the clash between the freedom of the West and the Islamism of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden’s hopes have been destroyed. Not only have Al Qaeda failed to force the U.S. out of Iraq but their fellow Sunnis have turned against them and are working side by side with the Americans. If in time Iraq can be sufficiently stabilised then there is a chance that it could be run as that unique thing, a free and democratic Arab state. Undoubtedly that is a long way off. U.S. forces may have to be based there for several decades, as they have in South Korea. Furthermore Iraq needs to find a way of reconciling its Sunni and Shia populations. Without a breakthrough in national reconciliation the country will again find itself sliding inexorably toward civil war.

However let us assume for a moment that the breakthrough does take place, what would the future hold for Iraq? If, as seems likely, oil prices remain high then the Government will have plenty of funds to begin reconstruction and buy off troublesome sectors of society. Provided that Sunnis have a stake in the running of the country U.S. forces will one day be able to withdraw to an over-watch role in Sunni areas. A U.S. backed Iraqi National Army will then gradually begin to take over responsibility for tackling the insurgency and criminal activity. A relatively stable Iraq and a growing economy may attract the doctors, teachers and traders who had earlier fled the chaos of the near civil war. An oil rich Iraqi Government could stimulate this reverse migration with grants for returning families. If the security situation remains calm the U.S. should slowly be able to begin to withdraw some forces and pull the rest back to desert bases. Better relations with Syria and Iran may also help to stem the flow of insurgents who have destroyed Iraq’s economy and infrastructure. However low-level violence will inevitably continue and U.S troops will have to remain in the country for at least another decade. Furthermore the extreme Islamism of the Shia majority will remain entrenched, especially around Basra and the South. We will never have Switzerland-on-the-Tigris but Iraq could turn out to be a well of stability, democracy and economic development in the Middle East. One thing that is certain is that although Al Qaeda will remain militarily undefeated its ideology had its day of reckoning with democracy and it lost, emphatically. And who might the Iraqi history books one day thank for that? Well the same man they may vilify for invading their country; George W. Bush