I’m told people have stopped listening/watching the news in Britain because it is too depressing. Well, there’s no question about the gloomy nature of the World today so, I suppose, we can’t blame people for wanting to look away from so many serious issues. The problem is, dare I say, that people not just here in Britain, are not watching the news because they are frightened of the truth and are looking for solutions from populist politicians who are saying everything is easy – trust me, I’m an ordinary guy just like you. The trouble is, in our democracies, these ordinary guys might just get elected with their easily digested and simplistic answers to complex questions. In Britain this might happen next May just at a time when the country and the world needs politicians who can see beyond easy answers and who refuse to pander to the emotions of an anxious electorate looking for solutions in  single issue politics.

Here in Britain, we have the phenomenon that is Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party.  His simple political solution to the world’s problems is for this small island to leave the European Union and to close the borders. It is simple, no question, but it is also balefully wrong and, let’s face it, it won’t work.

The trouble is that he is very persuasive and is seen as an attractive alternative to Britain’s ‘main’ political leaders. It is easy to hate our politicians and all of us can come up with easy reasons why ‘the economy isn’t working’, ‘foreign immigrants are taking all our jobs,’ ‘Europe is the cause of all our problems,’ etc. etc. etc. We can all come up with other catch phrases over a pint of beer with the friendly Mr. Farage. He is so persuasive that he has Britain’s political leaders on the back foot.

Prime Minister, David Cameron, is tearing up his old ‘liberal’ speeches and looking for ways of sounding electable and acceptable to an electorate looking for scape goats.  Every day we are being fed new ‘back of an envelope’ policies from his ‘think tank’ and, increasingly, he is being pushed to the right and now he is alienating Britain’s European partners and worrying the United States. He knows, but daren’t admit it, that Farageing the Conservative party is a road to disaster.

Poor much got-at Ed Milliband, the leader of the Labour party, is on the run too. He is only just holding on to a slender lead in the polls and is egg-splatteringly unpopular in the country. He is having to react to the Farage phenomenon too. Miracle-seeking Labour voters too are looking for happy endings in Mr Farage’s saloon bar politics.  Mr Cameron and Mr Milliband are not fools even if they are unloved – their sin will be ignoring what their intelligence tells them about British and international affairs and ducking their responsibility to inform the British electorate that next May’s general election is grown up time.

This is serious folks – like it or not. By ignoring the news, we ignore the developing problems in Europe and beyond – problems that Britain should be helping to resolve for all our sakes. All of us folk lucky enough to have a vote need to open our eyes and look.

President Hollande of France isn’t laughing , he’s made mistakes for sure and he too is deeply unpopular in his own land, but France should be our friend when we have enemies watching us with hatred in their eyes.

The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is the great survivor but even she is beginning to look rattled by the future  and not just by the economics. She is much more Britain’s friend then Britain realises and she is depressed by Britain’s growing isolationism.

President Obama too is having a bumpy time. He is facing the Mid-Term elections in a country where the people there too have stopped watching the news because it is depressing. Ebola, a potential catastrophe for some African countries, has turned into an American nightmare, a symbol of fear and a stick with which to hit their politicians, both Democrats and Republicans alike. Everywhere in the Western democracies, people are looking for simple solutions to complex problems and distrusting their politicians.

They are looking for simple solutions in some of the most troubled parts of the Middle East too. When the news is bad at home in Saudi Arabia, Tunisia or Yemen, their young men look to ISIS for their own naively imagined happy ending and flock, along with European and American ‘Jihadists’, to Syria and Iraq. The result doesn’t need repeating – even if we don’t watch the news, we all know about the horrors that the world has ignored for too long.

So, ignore the news if you want but, please, don’t think the solution to these many crises will be solved over a pint with the dangerous Mr Farage. I say it again, wake up Britain, it’s Grown Up Time.

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So we’re sending a few bombers to join the other nations who are using their planes to do too little too late. David Cameron, the British Prime Minister may talk big about defeating the monstrous organisation known as ISIS but if he really thinks that our RAF planes are going to make any difference then he’s as naive as he thinks we are. Let’s not be taken in by the rhetoric: this is a public relations job by our silver-tongued marketing Prime Minister.

A few planes against a vicious, fanatical and murderous army is just not enough. We are becoming the talk big, do nothing country and all this new bombing campaign will do is attract more crazed murderers to further acts of terrorism against the UK. If we buy into this without looking at the small print we’re in for a big disappointment.

If we want to end this horror then we have to do more than just shout loudly and do the minimum to save face. We have sat back while the Syrian president has committed genocide against his own people and we have sat back while ISIS grew in strength. Isn’t it time that we actually tried to stop the carnage? Isn’t it time that the grisly activities of  President Assad and ISIS are brought to a conclusive end?

How many Syrian and Iraqi people have to die (let alone the British and American hostages) before the United Nations declares enough is enough. Maybe, Mr Cameron believes that half a dozen British planes can end the horror of the last four years. Isn’t it just a sham to deny the necessity of going into Syria and Iraq where hundreds of thousands of civilians have died and millions have been made refugees? Or do we just not care here in the West with our isolationist instincts?

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The NATO leaders  are meeting here in the UK – well Wales actually but let’s not go on too much about nation states. Britain is in the middle of an important and historical debate about whether Scotland should leave the Union and become a small independent nation. Well, that’s up to the people of Scotland and we’ll know their decision in a few weeks from now. It’s none of my business even though my father was a Scot. I’ve always preferred to see myself first as a human being and second as a citizen of the World. I think we all need to respect and protect our own immediate environment so I’m a Lewesian too  – proud to live in the small English town of Lewes. Watching the NATO leaders and thinking about the state of the World today, I can’t help thinking that we would all do better to stand together rather than continually struggling to be tiny Nationalist units always at odds with our neighbours and  I have no doubt that in the present climate it is time for the peoples of the World to unite rather than splinter. This is a dangerous time  – 100 years after that first great Nationalist World War and the many countries of the World have been closing their eyes for too long to a danger that threatens all of us.

So let’s see if we can make it work – here in Europe, in the Americas, Asia, Australasia, Africa and in the Middle East. When all those leaders come together to conference and to pose for group photographs let’s encourage them to do our bidding. All of you out there, put away your differences and combine your economic and, yes, sadly, if necessary, military power, to eradicate from the World what President Obama describes as a cancer. Yes, let’s forget our petty differences and do something about that small band of brutal fanatics known as ISIS.  Who knows, if the nations of the World could unite over this then maybe other dreams could come true too.

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I like to see myself as one of those much sneered at people, a white, middle class and rather liberal male and I’ve mostly been proud of living in my native home here in the United Kingdom. I often look West across the Atlantic at another liberal democracy, the United States. Recently, I have been unsettled by the news both at home and in the great Nation Of The Free. I mostly defend ‘Western’ values against the hurled abuse and hatred that has been bellowed in our direction from murderous, so-called Islamic fundamentalists. I listened to their words about how we, in the West, are degenerate blasphemers and recoil from their unjustified murdering in the name of a God who must be in despair at what is being perpetuated in his name. These haters mostly look to the USA and the UK when they shake their blood-stained fists and I have to admit our societies are by no means perfect. We discuss these things, here in the UK, us liberal folk, usually over coffee or the odd beer or two, and shake our heads at our own government and anguish over the many reforms that we would like to see implemented in our own country.

No one can look forward to September any more without remembering the atrocities committed by Al Qaeda in the name of their God and, if we thought militant Islam’s dream of a Worldwide Caliphate was over,  then this year in Africa and in Asia, we learnt that this is far from true.

The brutality of the American journalist, James Foley’s murder in the blasphemed name of Islam has been merely the latest outrage to ricochet around the largely benevolent, caring and ethical peoples of the World.  At the centenary of the First World War, is 2014 bubbling over in hatred and bloodshed just to show us how little we have learnt in this time?

So no wonder, people are horrified by the violence and unfairness of the modern World. We have watched the slaughter in Africa, the Middle East and in Asia . Here in Europe and the USA, some people felt justified in demonstrating their own revulsion by looking for obvious targets. There will be no answers in ‘Islamophobia’ or anti-Semitism for the atrocities committed by soldiers, brain-washed adolescents and unbalanced religious fanatics under the instructions of their political leaders. Apart from a few but very noisy religious sects, most religious leaders share the disapproval of us democracy-loving liberals so it so very unfair for synagogues and mosques to become targets for ignorant but angry demonstrators.

We in the West, if we are to stand up for our principles, need to abjure all prejudices based on religion, race, sexual orientation or gender and to do our best, even if it’s only writing the odd blog, to remind people that prejudice is ignorance.

We, in the UK, have been watching the news from Ferguson, USA, recoiling from the evidence that America is still split by racial tensions exacerbated by very real unfairness where being a young black male appears to make you automatically suspect in the eyes of the law. I visited a Chicago jail some years ago and was shocked to discover that all the faces behind bars were black. Not much has changed it seems.

The UK has similar racial tensions but they are nowhere near as extreme as in the USA. Our multicultural state might actually be beginning to work but I am not suggesting that young black males in this country are any less likely than their American cousins, from being automatic police suspects. There is still a long way to go.  Our laws, our politicians and most of our media, reinforce the errors of racism and, there is a groundswell of opinion that this has had an effect.

Great if true. Then, a new set of problems emerge. In Rotherham, we discover, a group of Pakistani men have been operating a paedophile circle, raping and abusing teenage girls whose cries for help were largely ignored by the police and the local council leaders. It appears, there was a political panic on behalf of the authorities, that if they moved against this group of presumably Islamic Pakistanis then they would be accused of racism and incite a race riot. Excuse me but the racism is in the fear of identifying the perpetrators regardless of their race.

Let’s not blame Islam for Al Qaeda or ISIS, nor Judaism for Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Let’s not blame black Americans for standing up for injustice and let’s not blame innocent Pakistani residents in the UK for the crimes of a few sexual monsters.  There are offensive people professing to follow all belief systems. We only help them by seeing them as anything other than criminals.

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