The  coincidence of ITV exposing the most appalling practices of Gillman’s Funeral Directors, now sadly part of Funeral Services Partnership, and the commercial greed  encouraged by Dignity Funeral Services on the same night as Dead Good Job, BBC2, highlighted some of the very best in the death business, underlines some interesting issues.

It is difficult to comprehend the absolutely disgusting, disrespectful, racist, venal and unprofessional attitudes that characterise Funeral Services Partnership’s approach to handling every aspect of a funeral.

Despite the repeated apologies of Phillip Greenfield, CEO of Funeral Partnerships, nobody will believe his assertion that the practices exposed by an undercover reporter taken on as a casual worker at Gillmans are exceptions.  This description of their business, on their website, says it all: ‘a midlands based consolidator of funeral care providers.’

The appalling practices of dealing with a body, loathsome attitudes towards families, particularly those from ethnic minority communities, lack of training and understaffing is clearly endemic in an organisation that believes, in Greenfield’s words, to be a high street business just like any other, and whose main aim is to increase shareholder value.

So whatever you do, do not purchase a funeral from any company that is part of Funeral Services Partnership.

The same advice must be true of any funeral director that’s part of Dignity. It’s a stock exchange listed company, it wants to make as much profit as possible and it does so by ripping off the client. And clients who are bereaved, in shock and affected by intense grief are very easy to rip off, as Dignity know only too well. They’re good at it, so avoid a Dignity owned funeral director if you believe integrity is more important than profit.

Of the big conglomerates, that leaves the Co-operative Funeralcare Services. However, their funeral directors are now affected by a similar exposure of unprofessional, greedy and disrespectful attitudes broadcast earlier this year. As with Funeral Services Partnership and Dignity, the Co-operative Funeralcare is driven by accountants wanting to increase the bottom line figure, with service to the client coming a rather distant second, despite of course, statements to the contrary from their managing director. This blog shows their lack of professionalism.

Contrast this with the excellent standards shown by the funeral directors taking part in Dead Good Job. Of course, they knew a camera crew were following them around, but what is more germane is the attitudes of those running their independent funeral service companies such as Paul Sinclair of Motorcyle Funerals, Carl Marlow of Go As You Please and Gulam Mabud Taslim and granddaughter Moona Taslim-Saif who run the family Muslim funeral company, Haji Taslim in London’s east end.

Of course they run commercial businesses, but their shared ethos is to provide a good service which is based on a sympathetic understanding of giving what their clients want and can afford.  Indeed what was interesting was the community role played in particular by Haji Taslim, their community being the Muslims of Whitechapel and environs.

There needs to be a re-evaluation of what we expect a funeral to be and how it’s delivered. One increasingly attractive option is for a community funeral in which various members of a community, however that is defined, collaborate to deliver the care, the expertise, the mourners, the officiant and pooled funds to give a member of that community a good funeral.

That’s at the personal not for profit end of a spectrum at which the other end squat the disgusting, venal ‘profit is everything’ companies described above.

Somewhere closer to where we should be looking short term are the small, independent funeral directors not yet purchased by the Co-op, Dignity or utterly wretched Funeral Services Partnership. These independents deserve our support.

Long live the resistance! Today three more of the so-called Islamist Force to Protect Britain are no more.

It was the now usual pattern. At one of the bases where the Islamists are training those of our young men disloyal enough to take their place when they return to the Middle East next year, one of our resistance fighters enrolled only to take the first opportunity to slay the occupiers.

In fact, the ‘loyalty’ of most of these trainees is questionable…many either belong to the British Intrepid Terrorists (BRITS) resistance movement or are sympathetic to us.

While we BRITS are still divided between Catholics and Protestants, fundamentalists and atheists, moderates and extremists, England versus the other nations, we’re united by our belief that we should run Britain the way it has been run for centuries and our hatred of an army that has slaughtered so many innocent British people.

We didn’t invite the Islamists here to shore up the corrupt Blair regime, but they invaded nevertheless, telling us and the world it was for our own good because Blair was ‘moderate’ whereas we BRITS and our supporters – most of the population – wanted free elections, a free press, an independent judiciary, equality between men and women, decent education for girls, tolerance for people of all backgrounds and religions… and to drink alcohol as we have done for centuries.

Yes, some of our beers ended up on the streets of the Middle East but that is hardly an excuse for an army of muslim zealots to tear up our barley and destroy our breweries.  How would they like it if we sent our troops to ruin their poppy crop?

Faced with such occupiers, hostile to and ignorant of our traditions and values, the British people (apart from those who gain from assisting the Islamists and the Blairite administration it’s shoring up) have made their lives hell.

The Islamists policy was to defeat the BRITS (believing we were an unpopular group of extremists) and then convert the rest of the British people to be ‘moderates’, to support Blair and his cronies, to keep our boys and girls apart as they grow up, to persecute gays and minorities, to abstain from alcohol and give groups of local elders powers to decide civil disputes. They should have known the British would never be told how to live by people who have no idea of our history and values.

And despite their use of the most advanced weapons and the terrible toll of lives of our freedom fighters, our bravery and determination to remain British has given us victory.

The Islamist Force to Protect Britain were doomed from the start, and our resistance has forced them to announce they are going back to their countries – Saudia Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and those other feeble states who have sent their young men on such a thankless task.

Their politicians’ face saving tactic in the months before they go is to train some of our people to be police or security officers to enforce Blair’s corrupt laws after they pull out.

Their stupidity knows no bounds…this training gives our brave resistance fighters the weapons with which to kill their trainers, and the easiest of opportunities to do so. No wonder the people of these Islamist countries want their young men to leave as soon as possible.

The BRITS have won! We fought them in the back streets of London, the Yorkshire moors, the Scottish Highlands, the valleys of South Wales. Now they are holed up in their compounds, going on meaningless patrols of moribund villages, and even here we BRITS kill or maim them.

Long live the free people of Britain! And if those Islamists have any sense, they won’t interfere again in countries they know little about and have little interest in.

Three more British servicemen have been killed by rogue Afghanistan policemen they were ‘training’ as part of our strategy  to make the Afghan forces and police loyal to the Government and professional in the way they carry out their duties. We are told this justifies our intervention in Afghanistan in 2001.

I hope the politicians who involved the UK in Afghanistan, those that continued with this flawed foreign policy and the senior military men, either active or recently retired, who announce to the media that our strategy is paying off, sleep well at night.

I’m not sure how they can as they have sacrificed over 400 brave young lives in an excise they knew was doomed. History alone should have taught them to stay out of Afghanistan, though if they had analysed the situation in the country in 2000 the only sensible decision would have been to leave the country to sort out its own divisions and problems. The argument that by confronting the Taliban in Helmand province the streets of our cities would be made safe from Islamic terrorists is palpable nonsense.

Let’s hope that the abject defeat suffered in Iraq, the unsuccessful campaign against the Taliban (a collective noun for warlords, Islamists, bandits and nationalists) in Afghanistan and the failed and dangerous state that Libya now is – all reports show a descent into anarchy and lawless revenge killings – will stop any thought of intervention in Syria.

The situation there is desperate…it is beyond comprehension how Syrians can kill and torture fellow Syrians, how President Assad can turn his troops on his own people, how doctors turn in patients to the authorities if they have been injured while demonstrating.

But as the Russians and Chinese have argued, to use force in Syria in an attempt to bring peace will make the situation worse. Russia in particular knows first hand how the various factions are being supported by Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose enmity makes every dispute in the Middle East a war by proxy. Israel is, of course, happy to see a hostile neighbour at war with itself and will do nothing to help resolve the situation.

Add to that the febrile atmosphere of sectarian hatred: Christian against Muslim, Shia against Sunni, and the previously persecuted Alawis who now control the army and security forces determined to hang on to power at any cost. The President’s family is from the Alawite community and was from a poor background until his father rose in the military and took power in a coup in 1970.

You have only to read about the Hama massacre to know what Assad has inherited from his father and other family members.

Syria is now gripped by a civil war and the international community is unable to impose a peaceful outcome.  We will look on hopeless, horrified, depressed and desperate to alleviate the suffering. But we will also be helpless…we cannot help and to try will only make matters worse.

This morning, Dr Margaret Evison, the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan in 2009, was interviewed on The Today programme in the aftermath of the death of the six British soldiers. This brings the number of British service personnel killed in Afghanistan to 404.

Dr Evison said that when she visited the country two years ago her thinking about the cause for which her son died changed. The social pressures as well as “the revenge culture” and the physical size and layout of Afghanistan made her doubt if the war was winnable.

No war waged by foreign forces in Afghanistan is winnable. Experts in the Foreign Office will have stated this to Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, pointing out not just the lessons of history but that the current situation with the country divided into competing ethnic groups, tribes, warlords, bandits, Islamic extremists, run by an unpopular, ineffective and feeble central government, and with Pakistan, Iran and other neighbours intent on destabilising it would result in heavy casualties inflicted by a fanatical, invisible and, in some areas, popular force called the Taliban.

They would have told the politicians that the Taliban, the religious extremists and warlords would fight any moves to impose external values and culture with deadly effect. They would have dismissed the notion that an external force could defeat the Taliban, build a coalition to govern democratically or change a culture so embedded and so utterly different to ours.

Blair and Straw had commited to helping the US to invade Afghanistan and ignored the advice. Eleven years later and 400 plus brave, loyal and never to be forgotten deaths later (as well as thousands of innocent Afghans whose deaths have made the country’s hatred of the west far more intense) we are pulling out with our tails between our legs.

Let’s hope that our abject military and political failure in Afghanistan and the abysmal achievements of overthrowing Sadam and Gadhafi (Iraq and Libya now destined for years of bloody division, settling of scores and slaughter of innocents while Iran, Saudi and Israel fight proxy battles) prevent the west from considering any further military interventions in either Iran and Syria.

There are few certainties in politics or international affairs but the following is one of them: “The aims and objectives of external intervention in totalitarian Islamic countries will never be achieved, and instead intervention will make the situation more unstable and dangerous.”

I saw the other day a memorial message: ‘Gran will look down on us from heaven’. It made me wonder in a semi whimsical way, Where is heaven?

It isn’t ‘up there’ in the sense that somewhere between the earth and space is a place where God looks down, angels flutter around and saved souls swan around feeling happy, though the more active somewhat bored…how do you do occupy yourself for ‘eternity’?

Space missions to planets and amazingly powerful telescopes haven’t come across heaven, and thanks to scientific advance we’re discovering the vast limitless expanse of space. Heaven has still to be found above us, and our spirits will have to travel very fast to reach it if it’s further than we’ve discovered so far.

I might be proved wrong and a camera on board a rocket heading for the sun might shortly send back  pictures of endless rolling hills, clear streams, clean streets, stately homes and chateaux, cake shops, choirs singing and angels plucking at harps, rows of well stocked vegetarian food stalls, sandy beaches, warm calm seas, England winning Test matches, but I doubt it.

God’s up there, Christians have been told for many hundreds of years, along with a neat hierachy of semi human helpers: cherubims, seraphims, angels and saints with special privileges such as front row seats to hear the choirs and quality time discussing serious issues with God. Jesus is up there, at His right hand, as he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven.

Paintings and frescos have depicted these Elysium scenes in wonderfully realistic works of art down the centuries, their creators having no doubt that the firmament they were depicting was real, God and his crew were above us, we were being judged from on high, heaven was waiting for us if we believed, and who in those days before science provided more empirical answers, wouldn’t?

For Muslims, paradise is also tangible as a bounteous bejewelled garden where, notoriously, vast numbers of virgins wait to give solace to martyrs as they arrive.

This is now considered a mistranslation of the original ancient Arabic description, and a good thing too when you think of the moral ambiguity.  But it shows that Islam like Judaism, Christianity and most religions, has created a place with physical properties where our souls, spirits or reconstituted bodies are summoned when we die.

I try to get my head round this, but can’t. I conclude, not with any pleasure, that heaven doesn’t exist. If I accept it’s a metaphysical place, it simply confirms that this definition of heaven is a device used by religions to avoid the inconvenient truth that it’s not there.

This metaphysical destination for our souls by definition has no tangible location, no pearly gates, walls, clouds to sit on. It’s a place that religions create to reassure us that when we die there is more to follow if we are good and obey a God who has not only created where we live but where we’ll go next if we pass whatever test, given final sacraments or are part of the elect. There are all sorts of obtuse rules for our entry to paradise, not surprising really, as it adds to its mystery.

The metaphysical definition of heaven has another problem for me. If heaven isn’t a physical entity, does it have a timespan? Put another way, if heaven doesn’t exist as a place, does it exist in time? When did this metaphysical heaven start to host spirits and souls? At what stage in our evolution did man have a soul? Were we only given souls when we understood the nature of our relationship with God, or when He started his relationship with us?

I don’t believe we started from Adam and Eve, so when during our evolution were we advanced enough in God’s eyes to qualify for entry to heaven? Was heaven rather lonely for the first few thousand years, and is it not uncomfortably overcrowded now?

Silly questions I know, for if it’s a metaphysical place; it’s neither empty nor full, it’s not a real place.

The more I think about it, the less chance I have of  finding heaven.

In recent weeks, Cameron, Hague and now Phillip Hammond, have been patting themselves on the back for the role NATO played in freeing Libya from the tyrannical Gaddafi regime, replacing it with an administration that will be democratic and progressive.
Absolutely nothing will be said about the true situation, described below, which our interference has caused according to a leaked UN report.
That Gaddafi should have been removed from his corrupt and violent leadership, and that a democratic Libyan government is in the interests of the Libyan people and the wider world isn’t open to argument.
What is worrying is the dishonest attitude of our leaders. At the beginning of our involvement, they told the public that NATO bombers would be used to protect the Libyan people from massacre.
This stance quickly became one of assisting the rebels by being their airforce, taking out Gaddafi’s tanks, radar bases, ammunition stores and communications infrastructure.
Not surprisingly, the rebels were victorious in the civil war.
Equally unsurprising are the terrible and inevitable results of this victory.
Groups, armed with looted abandoned weapons, are controlling the streets of many town, settling scores including the murder and torture of black Africans who they think might have been mercenaries hired by a desperate Gaddafi.
Women and their children are being imprisoned and tortured for alleged links to the regime, and in Libya this means being part of the wrong tribe, from the wrong district or wrong Islamic sect.
Oh, and The Report of the Secretary-General on United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) states that: “Although thousands of Manpads (ground to air missiles that can bring down commercial airliners) were destroyed during the seven-month Nato operations, there are increasing concerns over the looting and likely proliferation of these portable defence systems.”
So don’t believe the PR spin being put on our government’s decision to get involved in the Libyan civil war. For as our leaders know, war is bloody, horrible and vicious. Yet how they quickly they joined in, regardless of the human and financial cost, the funerals of innocent people, the ruined lives and the obvious risk of an unstable, divided country replacing Gaddafi’s dreadful regime.

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President, told the global conference on Afghanistan’s future that international support after foreign forces withdraw in 2014 is crucial if Afghanistan is to remain stable.
Many observers foolishly regard a long-term international commitment to Afghanistan as critical, as Western forces prepare to leave the country by 2014. To date, almost 400 British troops have died in Afghanistan, to add to many more from the US and other allied countries.
Karzai no doubt has his eyes on the £4.5bn a year that ‘experts’ believe is needed if the country is to stay at current levels of development. Up to now, the vast majority of aid money has ended in the bank accounts of his friends and family.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle has said that the objective of the talks is “a peaceful Afghanistan that will never again become a safe haven for international terrorism.”  This goal won’t be reached as neither Pakistan nor the Taliban are taking part. 
I find it amazing that those who believe that Afghanistan can be turned into a peaceful liberal democracy are unwilling to address the following:
1. Afghanistan isn’t a conventional state, but a series of local centres of power run by warlords, Islamists, criminals, elders, many of whom are also locally elected leaders who resent the inefficiency and corruption of Karzai.
2. Afghanistan is made up of two major ethnic groups, the Pashtun and the Tajik, with several smaller groups subdivided into tribes.  Tribes often occupy specific areas such as valley passes and are suspicious and hostile towards other tribes. It is not possible to unify these groups or deal with them as if they are unified.
3. Some of these groups straddle national boundaries and have little loyalty to any nation but to their own group, its customs and beliefs. Their culture has nothing in common with Western values.
4. The Taliban are not interested in international terrorism. They are a loose alliance of Islamist gangs and individuals, many from other countries, who want to fight the occupying forces and install an extreme Islamist code of living, often supported by local tribes and villagers.
5. The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan can’t be closed. It is almost 2000 miles long and much only passable by those who know the mountain passes.
6. Pakistan cannot, even if it wanted to, control the homegrown Islamist militants who want to help their co-religionist zealots in Afghanistan.
7. Afghanistan, like most muslim countries, is divided between a Sunni majority and Shai minority with mutual fear and loathing. 

All the money and armaments in the world won’t change these facts.
So the quicker the West leaves the country to find its own solutions, the better, and also the more successful the solutions will be.

It would pay us to look at the world from the position of Iran if we want to prevent the current conflict escalating.

Let’s then study the map  as if we are sitting in Tehran and ruling Iran.

To the west is Iraq where western forces have twice invaded, the second time hunting down the leadership and putting them on trial resulting in their execution.

To the northwest is the border with Turkey, which seems to be militarily and politically closer to the west than ever before.

And further to the west sits an intransigent and militarily powerful Israel, determined to reduce Iran’s status in the region since its creation after the second world war.

Afghanistan is our eastern neighbour which the west invaded ten years ago in a panic reaction to the September 11 attacks.

On the other side of the Persian Gulf is the region’s dominant power, Saudi Arabia where Sunni Islam predominates. Historically opposed to Iran, where Shi’a Islam is the state religion, and a great supporter of the US, Saudi’s King Abdullah only last year urged the US to ‘cut the head off the snake’ or in other words, weaken Iran by a military strike.

We might then look further east at Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons and which, despite being a far more fertile breeding ground for Islamic terrorists than Afghanistan, is treated with great forbearance by the west.

Our eyes might also alight on North Korea, unpunished despite numerous military excursions and a deliberate policy of destabilising neighbouring countries. We will of course know the extent of Kim Jong-il’s nuclear arsenal.

We probably concluded several years ago that the best way to guarantee Iran’s peace was to have nuclear weapons. After all, wasn’t the possession of nuclear weapons what gave a divided world peace after the second world war? And don’t the US and UK still hold on to an albeit reduced nuclear capability to provide a deterrence?

Looked at like this, it is perfectly rational that Iran develops nuclear weapons, and equally unreasonable for the west to try to stop them. What’s good for the goose must surely be good for the gander.

Why doesn’t our government see the world from Iran’s point of view and discuss and reassure their nervous and fractious leaders that we don’t want a military conflict, that we value peaceful relations, increased trade, greater cultural ties and more strategic agreements?

Why don’t we let the Iranian government and people know we understand their history and rightful position in the region? Why don’t we encourage, support and value their role as a moderating influence in the predominantly Arab and often volatile middle east? In this context the issues of proliferation and nuclear control can be discussed calmly.

The answer is because Mr Hague and Mr Cameron have no idea of how to conduct a long-term, strategic foreign policy to ensure peaceful relations with countries they know little about.

There are few headlines to be garnered from discreet talks, opening new diplomatic channels and offers of targeted aid. Instead they seek the support from the tabloids when they expel diplomats, increase sanctions and before too long I fear, order our bombers to destroy Iranian targets.

Emotionally I’m an interventionist rather than an isolationist.

When I see innocent people suffer whether at the hands of their rulers, victims of natural disasters, or subject to discrimination and bullying I donate to emergency appeals, support societal change and confront bullies.

But I still cannot see any justification for the west’s military intervention in Libya. Indeed I find it very odd that only a few months after we’re being fed the line that President Gaddafi had reinvented himself as one of the Middle East’s good guys, we are expected to support military action clearly designed to remove him from power.

Why no negotiation with Gaddafi and his diplomats before the precipitous rush into military action? It was that notable opponent of appeasement, Winston Churchill, who said that ‘jaw, jaw is better than war, war.’ There wasn’t much talking to Gaddafi before the war planes went in.

Without little idea of the consequences the west has intervened in a civil war.

It hasn’t started too well. A US jet crash landed in the desert, some Libyan rebels went to rescue the crew and were shot at injured by another US plane.

The inability to distinguish between friend and foe dooms any military action to failure.

The rebels are currently the group on whose side we are intervening, but what happens when they take revenge on the communities and tribes that are loyal to Gaddafi?  Our forces will be in a state of confusion because the political goals of the various governments taking part in this fiasco are ill defined and incoherent.

Why also does the west seem to be so keen to kill innocent Muslims? Images of Libyans killed and maimed by western armed forces, families grief stricken at mass funerals, will without doubt radicalise Muslims in all parts of the world, and we know the terrible consequences of that.

I have a horrible feeling that the western leaders have not learnt from recent mistakes. Libya, like Afghanistan, is a cauldron of factions and tribes whose loyalty is far less to a national leader than to local or provincial government.

The lessons from our failure in Iraq have also been ignored. We have no exit strategy and no plans on how to deal with the power vacuum caused by Gaddifi’s overthrow, and these were overlooked in our haste to destroy Saddam Hussain.

Do our leaders know their history? Libya, created as a country less than 100 years ago, is really the sticking together of two different areas, one with its roots in Greek history, the other with Roman antecedents and 500 kilometres of desert in between. Our intervention might well result in two countries where there is now one, presumably not a regionally destablising outcome we favour.

Am I missing something? If so, please let me know.