The Duty of a Nation

England may have its flaws, but reading the newspapers today, these flaws are irrelevant compared to the vast, unimaginable and often fatal suffering endured by the citizens of other countries.

I refer, of course, to Burma, where the soldiers of the vicious military Junta that usurped the democratically elected government of that country are beating to death Buddhist monks and other citizens protesting against that Junta. For conducting a protest, an act that we here may exercise without fear of severe beating, these most courageous people are being murdered by a regime hell bent on absolute power.

And this is not the first time such a terrible act has occurred. In 1988, troops opened fire on demonstrators. Thousands died, and the regime lived on. Many analysts now fear a repeat of this most barbaric act of violence.

From our peaceful land, it may be difficult to comprehend the sheer scale of the violence that has been perpetrated by the Junta in Burma. Not simply violence against the person, but violence against their human rights, rights that we hold to be inalienable. The Burmese people have been stripped of their rights, their liberty and, in many cases, their lives, because they are, in the words of Gladstone, a nation struggling rightly to be free. For this reason, they must be supported by the free nations of the world in any way possible.

President Bush has already encouraged sanctions, although these are likely to be of limited use. Sanctions usually only impact the poor members of society, while the government remains strong, and this is not what we should be doing. Action must be taken, and it must be decisive action. We must give our full support to the protestors, and it must be practical support. If necessary, it must be the support of a rifle.

Current events in Burma are an excellent example of why we should fight to defend our freedoms, and a terrible sign of what may happen if we don’t. But it does not only show us why we must defend our rights at home, it shows us why we must defend liberty for all the peoples of the world, for all those who are oppressed and beaten, as the people of Burma are in their brave attempt to assert their basic human rights. It is our duty as free and powerful nations to fight against the injustice and inhumanity of such regimes, and this is a duty we cannot afford to be neglectful of.

Greed Is Not Good

Over the summer, the financial services industry came to a shocking conclusion: lending a lot of money to people who could never pay it was a very, very bad idea. This conclusion was shocking purely because it took them years to realise this fact which, to the layman at least, would appear to be obvious.

However, the markets will recover and the men in the city will continue to make ridiculous amounts of money out of all proportion with what they actually do. The real crisis does not lie on Wall Street or in the Square Mile, it lies with the hundreds and thousands of ordinary people who have been dispossessed or bankrupted by the sheer unadulterated greed of the bankers who lent them the money and thought only of the money, rather than the lives that they were about to destroy.

The truth is that the men in the city live only to make money. They lack morality, compassion and decency and have taken to heart the now infamous words of Gordon Gekko: Greed is Good. They don’t care that their machinations can and very often will bring the ruination of the ordinary man, as long as they get their money, everything is fine.

It isn’t just the bankers though, the politicians are also to blame. Only now is President Bush finally attempting to do something to stem the tide of repossessions, but nothing he can do will erase the fact that, when the politicians needed to protect their people, they failed. The relatively laissez-faire attitude of the governments along with the easy credit given out by the banks has conspired, however unwittingly, to destroy the lives of thousands of people. They have been left without homes and without funds, all thanks to the greed of the city.

Business is fine, I have no problem with business, but when money is put above people’s quality of life, it is not business, it is banditry. In future, the stock brokers and the bankers must think less about their wallets and more about the people they are dealing with, for Gekko was wrong, greed is not good.