Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

One of the basic tenets of the new politic of Northern Ireland that the various institutions were set up to encourage was the removal of religious bigotry and now we find that the Minister for Culture and Leisure has weighed in with the most extreme version of it that I’ve seen in a long time.

What he took upon himself was to write a letter suggesting (which, from the government minister in charge means essentially ordering) the Ulster Museum to incorporate creationism into its various displays. Not as a religious belief mind you, but as scientific fact (hence his referring to it as creationism rather than Christian belief).

Now, I don’t see that representing the influence of Christian (and Viking and Pagan) beliefs on the social development of Ulster as a problem. After all, there are significant Pagan burial grounds all over the place and we’re almost knee deep in Christian churches so obviously there’s been significant influence on the social development of the country over many centuries. In fact, those influences are shown at various points in the museum; the Christian ones aren’t so obvious as they’re so deeply ingrained in the culture.

What is wrong is to show the pseudo-science (false science to be truthful) that is creationism. This puts forward the notion that everything was created about 6000 years ago which is something of a problem as some of the exhibits in the museum are somewhat older than that. Millions of years older in many cases and billions of years older in some cases. Even the Egyptian exhibit would cause some issues.

The basic problem with his entire belief system is that it starts from the premise that evolution is only a theory. The problem is that there’s whole raft of science behind it which would need to be very wrong for it not to be right. For example, if the carbon dating used to date the fossils (millions of years old) is fundamentally wrong then it means that a number of fundamental physical theories are also wrong which would be a bit of a problem as some of them are required to control the operation of things like nuclear power stations. Similarly, it would mean that some fundamental principles behind biology are wrong and that’s a problem as some of those things that support evolution in biology are also used to create new vaccines. Creationism also has to deal with the “small” problem that for the first time man has created a life form that never existed before; that creation relies on using a number of those theories which support evolution.

But what about the other religions? If one is to be (incorrectly) represented then shouldn’t others be given equal treatment too? Nelson McCausland shouldn’t be permitted to try and impose his own fundamentalist Christian beliefs and should be considering his resignation speech this evening.

Those certainly seem to be good things on the whole, but what seemed very clear as the Queen’s speech ran on was that, by and large, it was a case of cancelling out just about every major piece of legislation that Labour has put through over the last 13 years or so.

Out goes the all-time black hole of expense which would have been ID cards and in comes the related limits on the DNA database and restrictions on CCTV. It’s nice to see that the big brother state is being rolled back in very concrete ways; hopefully they’ll rail back on some of the other less than libertarian ideas of the security services too.

Freedom of choice comes back to schooling with academies and to local authorities with more powers being devolved to them. Devolution in another form becomes safer through blocks on more powers being taken by Europe. Rolling back the state continues through reductions in the number of quangos and giving health professionals more say in the basic decision making.

Welfare reform is promised which is interesting as it’s something that the Conservatives have historically been scared of doing.

Pensions get some attention by regaining the link to earnings (good) and raising the state retirement age (not so good). Very good is the final acceptance that the government had a lot to do with the fall of Equitable Life and therefore should be paying compensation: this will take ages I’m sure and will definitely be complex as many of those due compensation have died.

A rather short speech which introduces a veritable mountain of legislation.

Saturdays seem to be getting busier and busier for us as it seems like every activity you want to do ends up being scheduled for some time on a Saturday. Thus, we found ourselves on the go pretty much non-stop from about 9.30 through to almost 6pm today.

For the usual reasons (ie religion), Sunday never gets even half so busy as even the least busy Saturday. Whilst may deride the “day of rest” aspect as being totally out of touch with modern society, we’re finding increasingly that we need that day of rest. Granted, we don’t drop all activities on Sundays but we generally end up with something like a half-day at minimum unallocated time.

Today on the other hand was truly manic! Since it was the day for my biology class it meant an early start for the kids with their Kumon which did have the upside that they’d a longer gap between that and the football. However, after football it was off to an audition so we ended up on the go ’til after 6pm: longer than a normal work-day!

Tomorrow is Wendy’s birthday so our normal schedule (OK, ragbag collection of things that we end up doing) will be thrown up in the air although I suspect that most of the birthday activities will take place in the morning and evening.

One of the problems with the paperless age is that you don’t have a little piece of paper to prove that you did whatever you said you did.

Despite having left France at the start of 2009 to live in Northern Ireland again, we still have problems with both tax and social services administrations. Today it was time to tackle offices in two different countries once more.

First off was the French taxation people who basically seem to have the view that nobody leaves France and that even if they do, the rest of the world is basically just an extension of France. I came across this several years ago when someone posted a question about it on one of the French forums. Basically her problem was that she had left France almost a year before, her post redirection service was running out and several French departments wouldn’t accept that she’d left so were therefore continuing to send her assorted bills (and benefit payments). As it turned out, the only proof that she had really left which would be accepted was a Certificate de Residence from her mairie. Unfortunately, there aren’t any mairies outside France the the closest equivalent (ie her local council) had no such document that they could give her. In the end, she had to just let the redirection service run out and leave the various departments to work it out for themselves.

I’m merely at the first off-ramp from that particular road at the moment so today it was the turn of the French taxation people to have another form sent back to them pointing out that I haven’t lived there for well over a year now. Somehow I don’t think they’ll take any notice of that as they didn’t last year but I guess it’ll be out of my hands soon as my own redirection service is running out.

On the other side of the fence, getting fully into the UK system is proving to be equally difficult. This time last year the health service were refusing to believe that we intended to live here and were merely health tourists. Quite how one proves one’s intent to live somewhere (which is what they wanted us to do) is still beyond me but we wore them down in the end. Child benefit was particularly difficult and instead of the “couple of weeks” quoted initially it turned out to be closer to four months. The particular problem with that is that you need the Child Benefit number for other forms and the lack of it complicates life no end. The other little problem is that we just couldn’t work out a way to tell the French child benefit equivalent that we’d left and they should stop paying us and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were still paying us.

At the moment, we’re working on the Child Tax Credit people who said last October that they couldn’t process our claim without a Child Benefit number, then they said almost two months ago when we finally could give them the Child Benefit number that it would take a “couple of weeks or so” to pay. Now they say they’ve no record at all of the claim!

Still, it’s nice to see European harmonisation of the taxation and social security systems. It would have been better to harmonise upwards in quality but I guess you can’t have everything.

Much as most people like their summer holidays and many of those expect to be flying to somewhere in Spain, there’s major uncertainty this year thanks to the Icelandic volcano.

So what should you do?

The most reliable approach is to forget about any holidays requiring air travel in the northern hemisphere. In practical terms that will limit the number of places that you can consider quite considerably unless you’re prepared to devote quite a lot of your holiday time to travelling. Typically, from England you wouldn’t be able to go much further south than northern Spain or much further east than Switzerland with two days travelling in each direction, drop that to one day and you’re largely limited to northern France, Belgium, Holland, Ireland, and, of course, somewhere in the UK.

If that doesn’t suit, and you really must go by air then assembling your own holiday by booking your flights and accommodation separately is going to require good holiday insurance that definitely covers volcano problems. Whilst the airlines might be required to be reasonable about paying for accommodation, those laws don’t extend to accommodation and you could easily find yourself paying for accommodation that you can’t get to. Alternatively, if you book a package deal you should be covered for problems. Either way, do bear in mind that a cancellation can leave you either stranded at home (less costly obviously) or at your destination and if it’s the latter you need to budget for a lot of potential extra expenses ie don’t aim to spend down to the last penny on your day of departure.

Of course, the biggest plus of booking a holiday involving flights is that it’s quite likely to be considerably cheaper all-round in that there should be a whole lot fewer people booking such holidays this year which means a lot of surplus accommodation.