Politics

POLITICS

I don’t usually write anything about Politics, but the recent elections at which I did vote, seem to me to be setting a trend that require lots of us who, maybe think differently, to say something.

An Iraqi friend of mine recently said to me, maybe there is a problem with democracy in that stupid people get to vote; perhaps we should have an exam before people are given the franchise?

Recently listening to the debate in a ladies’ hairdressers, waiting for my wife, who had just commented on the problems for the kidnapped girls in Nigeria, I was staggered to discover from about 10 plus people there, she was the only one who knew that girls had been kidnapped.  They moved on in conversation to various other world shattering events, but it seemed to me that my wife was the only one who had a TV that showed any news programmes.  The world affairs, local and national politics seemed at such a low level of interest to them I wanted to scream argh…

It isn’t that this stuff isn’t out there it is, but as most of the main three political parties are saying the message has not got through, perhaps that is because they shy away from the real facts to try and be popular to those who don’t listen to them anyway.

The big issue over the UK and actually many other European countries has been immigration, immigration, immigration!  There have been lots of rhetoric but not many facts; Facts that are easily findable, such as:

1.       London, one of the most prosperous European Cities, owes much of its prosperity to the fact that it is such an international, diverse city due to immigration.

2.       When questioned about what percentage of immigrants that go to make up the UK population; people had wildly wrong numbers, usually way, way too high. In fact out of the 15.4 million refugees in the world currently, due to war, bad government and the like in 2012 the UK only had 193,510 of these people in the countries that go to make up the union and that represents just 0.33% of our population, did you know that? 

3.        Over a quarter of our NHS Drs are immigrants, I did not hear that fact quoted, maybe it was and I missed it.  Did you know that? I wonder where we would be if they all downed tools?

4.       When talking about immigration we don’t talk about emigration do we? Yet something like 5.5 million British people permanently live in other countries other than the UK, I wonder how those countries responded to those immigrants.

5.       Nasty one here, immigrants are 60% less likely to claim benefits than a UK born person, Oh dear what shall we do about benefit tourism?

6.       Oh and those pesky EU immigrants, taking all our funds, did you know that between 1995 and 2011 EU immigrants made a net contribution of £8.8 Billion more than they gained from being here.

7.       It seems for all the cries, most studies suggest that immigration has little or no effect on overall employment or British workers unemployment. I am pretty sure that often immigrants are job creators rather than job takers, and that they often end up creating wealth and employment on a grand scale. Think about companies started by immigrants, like Marks and Spencer’s, Burtons, Mumtaz Khan Akbar turnover £85 million, James Caan  Turnover £250 million, you probably know him if you watch Dragons Den. Sir Anwar Pervez who set up his first corner shop in London in 1963, expanding to ten convenience stores by the early 1970s and now head of Bestway which has the second highest turnover of any cash-and-carry in the UK.

8.       14% of start-up businesses in the UK were founded by immigrant entrepreneurs, according to a newly released report. The report says that there are 456,073 immigrant entrepreneurs working in the UK who have founded 464,527 businesses which employ 8.3m people.  http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-03-14/

And just for fun have you ever been to an ODEON cinema, very British, why call it ODEON I wonder well actually his immigrant name didn’t seem to have the right ring so he thought up the acronym ODEON and in case you are wondering what it’s an acronym for, it stand for Oscar Duetsch entertains our nation.  Very English!

Enough already I hear your cry! But if we are going to have this debate lets have the other positive side of what make places like London so prosperous.  Yes there are problems of immigration I have some solutions to that too if you do not want the people to come and make us richer, but that’s for another day.

Adrian Hawkes

www.adrianhawkes.blogspot.com

W.785

Edited by Gena Areola

Prayer Can Be Dangerouse!

Prayer Can Be Dangerous!

 Prayer 6
for UCB
3 min script

I have a friend that I worked with, who, when I was with him saw many answered prayers, particularly for sick people. But not everyone was healed.  I asked him one day, ‘why is it some are not healed and some are?’  I have never forgotten the answer, he said, ‘lots of people ask me why some are not healed, and do you know what my problem is?  Why is it that some are healed, why does God answer prayer?’  In other words he was saying he was as puzzled by the answers as much by the non-answers if you like.

Sometimes prayer can be dangerous, particularly answered prayer, because that puts us on the spot.  If you think about it, there are lots of times when God answered prayer in scripture that actually God didn’t want to answer. There isn’t time in such a brief chat to go into them in detail, but if you know a bit about scripture you can see them there.  For example, God did not want Israel to have a King, but they kept asking and in the end he answered their prayer, and then the problems came!  Then there was another King who God told, ‘put your house in order you are going to die.’  He begged God in prayer for more time, God answered his prayer but oh what problems his lengthened life gave to everybody else!  There are lots of other stories I could tell you from scripture that are like that, so be careful of nagging God for an answer, especially if God has said it’s not a good idea.

I have a little phrase that fits well with prayer, it goes like this, ‘God will not do what you can do, and if you want God to do what he can do then do what you can do and you will find that he will then do what only he can do.’  Now please don’t make that into some kind of doctrine as God might just do something that you haven’t even thought of.  I do often find people are praying for things that they could do themselves. For example, ‘Dear God please send my friend that small amount of money that he needs,’ when actually they have that money and maybe they should just give it them anyway and say ‘thank you God that you have given me money that I can now pass on to my friend.’

One of the stories from scripture that I think illustrates this well is the story of Nehemiah, he prays ‘oh God the walls of Jerusalem are broken down, it is such a shame, do something.’  He then goes in to see the King because he was the King’s cup-bearer, and the king gives him God’s answer, ‘why are you so miserable?’ he says to Nehemiah, a very bad thing for a cup-bearer to be, maybe the King’s wine was poisoned and he was not saying.  But obviously the King trusted Nehemiah, its good when people of the living God can be trusted.  Nehemiah told the king what he had been praying about and the King says, ‘okay, off you go and build the walls up, and I will supply the money and the materials.’  I bet that was not the answer that Nehemiah expected when he said the prayer.  I do find though that often God will say, ‘okay, heard your prayer, now get on with the answer and I am with you!’  Scary stuff praying isn’t it?

The thing is that God is with us, and I recon that he knows us better than we know ourselves and so when he tells us to be the answer or part of the answer then also we should know that he is not leaving us alone.  I remember when I left college to take charge of a church community, I said, ‘God I don’t mind where you would like me to go, but please, if you don’t mind, I don’t want to go to Ireland or London.’

After five years in the North of England the opportunity came for me to move to London, I wondered if God had forgotten my prayer, but I decided to go and have a look anyway, and then I decided to give it a try and so we moved to London.  I’ve been in London now for 36 years and can’t really imagine being anywhere else.  I just have this feeling that God knows me better than I know myself.  I am sure he was not forcing anything on me, but actually saying, ‘I know Adrian, if he just tries to do this with me he is going to enjoy it, I know he thinks he won’t but let’s just see shall we.’  And of course God is right.  Sure, praying can have that dangerous edge to it, when God says, ‘okay you have prayed,  now I want you to be the answer to that prayer, but I am with you and because I am with you nothing will be impossible to you, and you are going to really feel actual enjoyment doing it for me and with me.’

6 for UCB

Adrian Hawkes

W. 883

Editor A Brookes.