Month: July 2013

London mayor, Boris Johnson, at a  ‘Boris Bikes’ hiring station

‘Boris Bikes’ is the unofficial name for London’s bicycle hiring scheme, sponsored by Barclays Bank and initiated by London Mayor Boris Johnson. The scheme has recently been extended from Central London to some inner London boroughs like Wandsworth.

This has caused much controversy because bicycle hiring stations are being erected without proper consultation with residents, so valuable parking spaces for cars has been lost.

My main concern with the scheme, which I think is an excellent idea, is the danger posed to cyclists in London due to other traffic. Even where there are cycle lanes most of these are not physically separated from other traffic. However I am greatly in favor of bicycles, buses and trams being given priority over private cars in big cities like London.

Not only are our roads congested with moving traffic (sometimes moving at a crawl), but many side roads have cars parked in them all day for most of the week. This is no doubt because owning a motor vehicle in big cities like London often means people are very limited as to when they can actually use them. I gave up a small second-hand van years ago as it was parked in the road most of the week, and I still had to buy a season ticket for public transport to get to and from work because of parking restrictions.

Now we also have the Congestion Charge (recently contracted to a smaller area due to opposition from local motorists) as well as parking restrictions, and on our estate there are now two parking schemes. One is free to residents and their visitors if they can find a free residents’ parking bay, otherwise they have to pay to park in the road. Consequently other roads with currently no parking scheme are clogged with parked vehicles all day, and this is also true of many other parts of London.

Having a motor vehicle in big cities like London, let alone more than one motor vehicle, is becoming more and more of a problem for the owners and Londoners generally. Increasingly it is becoming more difficult to use them due to the Congestion Charge, parking restrictions, etc. Even if you use them to take a trip to the countryside or coast, because London has no urban motorway network it can take an hour or more just to get outside the metropolis. It is much quicker to go by train.

We sometimes went on coach trips from Battersea to the coast, and even using the few dual carriageways and the M25 orbital motorway it took over an hour to reach the Croydon area, which could  be reached in 10 minutes by train!

There was rumor of a proposal by the European Union to ban all private car ownership in inner cities (apart from vehicles owned by the disabled, doctors, etc.) Even if we don’t go this far, it may be necessary to widen the Congestion Charge area again, raise the charges, increase parking charges and restrictions and impose a higher road tax on vehicles owned by motorists living in the inner cities.

Due to the impracticality of using motor vehicles to travel to work in many cases in the big cities (due to lack of parking space, Congestion Charge, etc.) many drivers leave their vehicles parked all day, only able to use them in the evening and weekends for occasional shopping and other trips. Of course there is the ‘school run’ by parents who own cars, now it is often considered unsafe to let children walk or take public transport to school like we used to.

I can’t help feeling that owning one or more cars is often more of a status symbol than anything in big cities, where their usefulness is limited. I have not missed the motor vehicle I gave up years ago because of our excellent public transport system which runs 24 hours a day.

Apart from the factors mentioned above, motor vehicle use has to be reduced to combat global warming and climate change. Bicycles keep you fit (if the roads are safer) and do not emit polluting fumes. Therefore I am all in favor of the Boris Bikes scheme being extended to complement public transport, and car use in inner London being discouraged. However our roads need to be made safer, more segregated cycle lanes in London, and it is true that residents should be properly consulted before bicycle hiring stations are established, though there will always be a conflict between motorists wanting more parking space and other residents.

So I give a big thumbs up to Boris Johnson’s cycle hire scheme and extending it to other parts of London, but I can also see a need to restrict private car use in at least the inner city.

When you hear about wars and murders, gang warfare, atrocities, the threat of nuclear annihilation which still hangs over us all, it can be pretty depressing. As can the unfair distribution of wealth throughout the world, with millions dying of starvation whilst most of the world’s wealth is in the hands of the few.

It seems there is no spiritual progress for humanity, until you look back into history and see how much worse things were then. Read The Bible or some other ancient text, and you’ll see what cruelties were enacted upon completely innocent people, sometimes, if what we read there is true, sanctioned by people like Moses. Instructing the Israelites to rape and kill innocent people, including children. There’s the crucifixion of Christ and others, a common form of torture and execution at one time.

We come to the the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, with more terrible tortures, people burned alive, or hung, drawn and quartered. Stoning to death was also sanctioned in The Bible, in The Koran, etc. It still goes on today in some Islamic countries.

Very, very gradually we have become more civilized, though horrors and atrocities still occur. While we and other countries threaten millions with nuclear weapons we cannot claim to be really civilized. When we bomb innocent civilians, and teach young men to kill each other just because they are born in different countries, we can’t claim to be really civilized either.

On the other hand, outside of war situations and hoping the nuclear weapons will never be used again and will eventually be abolished, we have made slow progress. Whilst various forms of torture are still practised behind closed doors it is no longer acceptable for any nation to admit it happens, and things like burning witches alive, etc. cannot be decreed by courts of law. Indeed capital punishment has been abolished in many countries and in many states of the U.S.. Even in those states which still keep it, at least the gas chamber and electric chair are slowly being retired in favor of the lethal injection. Progress in human rights and a better world is painfully slow. It is more advanced in some countries and cultures than in others.

Lenin once wrote about progress being ‘Two steps forward, one step back’, and that certainly describes his revolution. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels showed how the world’s workers were exploited in the era of capitalism, which followed on from feudalism, and pointed the way forward to a better world under Socialism and ultimately the utopia of Communism. What happened in the Soviet Union and the other Socialist countries showed the limitations of the revolutionary method and the so-called ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, which turned into a dictatorship of a new privileged bureaucratic class. I’ve written about why this occurred in previous blogs, but the point I want to make here is that in the 20th Century there was a real attempt to build a utopian society, and while this was never achieved, the basis of a fairer society was established. All the Socialist countries had good public services, subsidized essentials, good public transport systems, good education, good health services, full employment, security in old age, but the privileged elite which had infiltrated the organs of power lived in luxury compared to the ordinary citizens. Unfortunately in the years 1989-1991 all the good things this imperfect Socialism had achieved were swept away, and many of the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats who had exploited the people were kept on. More like one step forward, two steps back in that case!

Nevertheless some of Marx’s and Engels’ principles have been followed elsewhere. Here in Britain, immediately after WWII, we had a wave of Socialist measures including the setting up of the Welfare State including the National Health Service, following Marx’s formula for Communist society: ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’, since these things were paid for by taxation in some form or other, but were free to those who needed them most. Unfortunately the post-War Labour government’s achievements have also been slowly whittled away by subsequent administrations, but here and in many other countries free medical and hospital services are still available.

Of course there was the terrible 20th Century slaughter of two world wars in which millions of innocent civilians and conscripted soldiers died, and the Nazi Holocaust.  It is said that this world is where we learn lessons, and that is why progress is so slow because we have to learn the hard way not to repeat these terrible things.

I am, and always have been, an optimist. I always hope for a better world, and believe a new generation will find a way to gradually bring it about. I also believe the mistakes of the past are valuable lessons for the future, so any 21st Century Socialism must avoid, for instance, the one-Party state or one-Party dominated coalition if a corrupt new bureaucatic ruling class is not to emerge again and limit progress towards the Communist ideal, if indeed that can ever be achieved. I have very strong doubts about that, since it involves the withering away of the State itself so places enormous responsibilities on individual citizens to act collectively in a self-governing society without money, police, armed forces, etc. I would be satisfied if world wide Socialism was established with no privileged ruling elite, but even that seems a very long way off, though now Latin America seems to be leading the way.

However building a better, fairer world based purely on materialism, or dialectical materialism, will never work. My friend Victor Zammit has written about dialectical spiritualism. We must all become aware that we survive death, and that there is a law of cause and effect, also known as karma. What we sow surely we will reap, nobody gets away with anything. Once humanity becomes convinced by the overwhelming evidence of the true nature of the afterlife, now all over the Internet but suppressed by much of the media, by orthodox science and orthodox organized religion, then much more rapid progress will  be made to a fairer society.

Medical advances mean resuscitation of people who once would have died has greatly increased the prevalence of NDEs (Near Death Experiences), and these prove there is an afterlife, that our minds are separate from our physical bodies, and the trauma of the Life Review shows that we are all connected, and that our actions and their consequences will be felt by us, whether good or bad. There truly is no Heaven and no Hell, these are gross simplications of organized religion. There are endless spheres, dimensions or planes and we gravitate after this life to be with people much like ourselves, so you can imagine where people like Hitler and other cold-blooded murderers ended up! Not in very pleasant places, but there is the possibility of progress and spiritual development for all when they tire of being treated as badly as they treat others.

Meanwhile, I also firmly believe based on overwhelming evidence, an Inter-Galactic civilization closely observes us, as they have done for centuries but with increasing interest since the development of nuclear weapons, to await the time we have put our wars and national rivalries behind us, and are ready to join the civilized Inter-Galactic community. UFOs are real, and it may be thanks to them and Spirit forces also watching over us that we haven’t destroyed the world already.

I’ll give just two practical instances:

UFOs over the USA on at least one occasion neutralized ICBMs (InterContinental Ballistic Missiles) armed with nuclear warheads in their silos.

On a Soviet nuclear submarine during the 1962 Cuba crisis, one officer refused to agree to push the nuclear button which would almost certainly have started a nuclear World War III. Three officers had to agree, and the other two were ready to push the button. Spirit acted on this third officer to save the Earth.

How many other times have Spirit and/or extra-terrestials acted to save our planet? Now it is time we got our act together and started to save it ourselves, and built a better, fairer, more humane and environmentally friendly society. A less materialist one where not everyone has to own even one car polluting the atmosphere and clogging up the roads, but a society which puts the community and the environment first. You can call it what you like – a Socialist society, a Green one, or simply a society based on spiritual and humanist values instead of purely materialist ones based on greed.