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A weak and foolish leader

For ten years Gordon Brown schemed, being Chancellor to Tony Blair's Prime Minister, and waiting for it to be his turn at the top job. Now that he has it, it has rapidly become apparent that, like a puppy chasing a car, he has no idea what to do with it now he has finally caught it. Worse, it has also become apparent that he is a coward.

First, he floated the idea of a snap election to confirm his Premiership, but chickened out almost immediately. He might well have won it, but floating the idea and dropping it at the first hint of criticism just made him look weak.

Then he allowed the Daily Mail to bounce him into undoing the reclassification of cannabis from class B to class C, despite all the experts advising him that it was pointless and would not achieve the desired effect. Weak and foolish. People smoke cannabis either because they enjoy it, or because it's the only effective treatment for a number of medical conditions. A great many of them are natural Labour supporters, if you can persuade them to turn out and vote. They certainly won't vote for him now. Nor will they be replaced by Daily Mail readers, diehard Conservatives who wouldn't vote for Gordon if he dyed himself blue and had "Tory till I die" tattoed onto his forehead. Which he almost has.

Then, incredibly, he allowed Alistair Darling, his Chancellor, to abolish the 10p rate of tax that he himself had introduced to lighten the tax burden on the poor. After howls of protest from all sorts of people, most of them his own supporters, he and Darling are now back-pedalling frantically, promising extra tax relief to compensate. But the damage has been done, a clear message has been sent to the poor that Brown is much more interested in trying to buy the votes of Middle England (which in any case won't work) than in looking after his own core supporters.

So after all that, Labour are as far behind in the polls as they have been in living memory, and the Tories have won their first by-election in twenty-five years, turning a comfortable Labour majority into a comfortable Tory one. There are audible mutterings from many in the Labour party that they need a new leader, right now. They do, desperately, or they are going to get absolutely hammered at the next election.

Joe versus the climate

Most scientists now agree that climate change is real, we are indeed causing it, and it is going to wreak havoc. But unfortunately, we aren't really doing anything about it. The kind of measures being enacted so far are a bit like trying to stop an avalanche with a woolly scarf. Trading licenses to limit the amount of CO2 emissions won't do it, nor will carbon offsetting.

In a democracy, you can only make the kind of sweeping changes that are needed if you can persuade Joe Public to support them. But Joe wants his car, and his cheap flight to the sun every year, and his patio heater, and will vote out anyone who dares to suggest that those things are not sustainable and must be taken away. If you can somehow persuade Joe Public not to demand those things, perhaps something could be done.

Good luck with persuading Joe, though.

Agree? Disagree? Send your thoughts to thoughts at jonstorm.com.

Blaming God

Religion often gets a bad press nowadays. It's fashionable to speak of it as a thing of the past, or even a Bad Thing altogether, as you read yet another report of religious fanatics blowing people up, sometimes along with themselves. Look at the history of most faiths, and it's not hard to find all kinds of atrocities committed in the name of God - conquest, torture, child sacrifice, killing and maiming in all kinds of imaginative ways.

It's all true, of course, but it's not the whole story. Religion has also been a hugely important force for the civilisation of mankind. Without the idea that each person is judged and held accountable for their actions over the course of their lives, the world would be a very different place. This concept pervades all of our cultures, even amongst people who claim not to believe a word of it. Everyone has a sense of right and wrong, even if they don't always follow it, and that comes straight from religion. Without it, the birth of civilisation would have been impossible, and we'd probably still be living in caves and bashing each other over the head with rocks.

So next time you hear about some loony blowing himself up for God and taking scores of innocents with him, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, he's a loony, but it isn't God's fault. You don't really think he's right about it all being God's idea, do you? Of course not. He's just gullible, conned by evil men for their own purposes : usually politics, when you get right down to it. But against the handful of insane fanatics murdering "for God", you have to set the millions doing good for no other reason than it's the right thing to do - most of us, really, in our own small ways. Not many people like to think of themselves as the bad guy, and religion did that. Even if you don't believe in God, that surely has to be a good thing.

A question that is often asked by sceptics is "if there is a God, why doesn't he save the dying, end suffering etc"? But God must have a very different view of us than we do of ourselves. Most of the world's religions believe that when we die, some part of us goes to God. Would you "save" a caterpillar from turning into a butterfly?