1500 Year Old Bible Predicted the Coming of Prophet Mohammed(P.B.U.H)

A 1,500-year-old Bible in which Jesus is believed to have foretold the coming of the Prophet Mohammed to Earth has attracted attention from the Vatican this week.

Pope Benedict XVI has reportedly requested to see the book, which has been hidden in Turkey for the last 12 years, according to the Daily Mail. 

The text, reportedly worth $22 million, is said to contain Jesus’ prediction of the Prophet’s coming but was suppressed by the Christian Church for years for its strong resemblance to the Islamic view of Jesus, Turkish culture and tourism minister Ertugrul Gunay told the newspaper.

“In line with Islamic belief, the Gospel treats Jesus as a human being and not a God. It rejects the ideas of the Holy Trinity and the Crucifixion and reveals that Jesus predicted the coming of the Prophet Mohammed,” the newspaper reported. 

“In one version of the gospel, he is said to have told a priest: ‘How shall the Messiah be called? Mohammed is his blessed name.’

“And in another, Jesus denied being the Messiah, claiming that he or she would be Ishmaelite, the term used for an Arab,” the newspaper added.

According to the report, Muslims claim the text, which many say is the Gospel of Barnabas, is an addition to the original gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.

St. Barnabas is traditionally identified as the founder of the Cypriot Church, an early Christian later named an apostle.

Gunay said the Vatican has officially requested to see the book, which Turkey had discovered during a police anti-smuggling operation in 2000. 

The gang was reportedly convicted of smuggling various items seized during the operation, including the Bible, and all the artifacts were kept in a safe at an Ankara courthouse. 

It remained closely guarded by authorities before being handed over to the Ankara Ethnography Museum where it will soon be put on show.

A photocopy of a single page from the leather-bound, gold-lettered book, penned in Jesus’ native Aramaic language is reportedly worth about $2.4 million.

But skepticism over the authenticity of the ancient handwritten manuscript has arisen. 

Protestant pastor İhsan Özbek has said this version of the book is said to come from the fifth or sixth century, while St. Barnabas had lived in the first century as one of the Apostles of Jesus.

“The copy in Ankara might have been written by one of the followers of St. Barnabas,” he told the Today Zaman newspaper.

“Since there is around 500 years in between St. Barnabas and the writing of the Bible copy, Muslims may be disappointed to see that this copy does not include things they would like to see … It might have no relation with the content of the Gospel of Barnabas,” Özbek added.

But suspicions could soon be laid to rest. 

The real age of the Bible could soon be determined by a scientific scan, theology professor Ömer Faruk Harman told the Daily Mail, possibly clarifying whether it was written by St. Barnabas or a follower of his. 

Squatting law will only criminalise the homeless. Let's demolish clause 130

The million empty homes in Britain are the real scandal, not the squatting of a tiny number of occupied properties

A new law is racing through the Lords, having passed the Commons. It is called the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, and it contains an infamous clause, which goes by the number 130. If clause 130 passes, squatting an unoccupied residential property will no longer be a civil offence but a criminal one, punishable by a maximum fine of £5,000 – which feels like a joke when tossed at the homeless – or a sentence of up to a year. If the government does jail the homeless for being homeless, the joke surely is – well, they won't be homeless any more.

This government's appetite for criminalising poverty is unslaked. It is, I suppose, a natural psychological response to their policies; once you have demonised your problem, you are not responsible for solving it. Squatters are by definition homeless and, according to the charity Crisis, 40% of single homeless people have squatted. Research also shows that 41% have mental health needs, 34% have been in care, 42% are ill or disabled, and 21% self-harm.

So these are the most fragile of citizens, who have almost always asked for housing and been refused – 78% have been turned away by local authorities because single people are rarely eligible for housing. Criminalisation only increases their vulnerability. Rough sleeping and prostitution may follow, or something worse. Life expectancy is 47 for homeless men, 43 for women.

Some do not last that long. Six years ago I met a homeless woman aged 21 under Waterloo Bridge. Her name was Kimberly Dowling and a month later she was dead and interred in a grave in Kilburn. So who can blame the homeless for squatting? You might even call it using your initiative to improve your situation, a homily Conservatives usually purr at, but not this time.

The government likes this law, and is ready to lie to persuade the public to accept it, possibly because squatting is now associated in the public mind with political activism, and imprisoning your critics is always tempting. It is, in fact, already a criminal offence to squat an occupied home, to access utilities without paying or to commit criminal damage, under the Criminal Law Act of 1977. The tiny number of cases where occupied homes are squatted are swiftly and cheaply resolved if the law is correctly enforced.

Two high-profile cases last year – Julia High, who came home from the Proms to find her house squatted by Romanians, and of Oliver and Kaltun Cockerell, whose home was squatted before they moved in – allowed Conservative MPs to mislead the public and conjure nightmarish visions of violation of their soft furnishings. The housing minister, Grant Shapps, told the BBC that when homes are squatted, the "police don't act because the law does not support the police acting".

The MP Mike Weatherley told the Daily Mail: "If those squatters claim that they did not break into your property – though they almost certainly will have done – you have no powers to throw them out." This is a lie and 160 housing lawyers and academics wrote to the Guardian to say so. There is a problem with enforcement, but that is the fault of the police, not the homeless; the Law Society and the Criminal Bar Association oppose the new law, and even the Metropolitan police thinks the current one is " broadly in the right place". Nor is the public agitated by squatting. When the Ministry of Justice consulted about squatting, 2,126 responses came from "members of the public concerned about the impact of criminalisation" and only 25 were from "members of the public concerned about the harm squatting can cause". The people, as ever, are kinder than their government.

The timing could not be more vicious. The chronic shortage of social housing, the cuts and the economic depression create a perfect storm of a housing crisis. Homelessness is up 15% nationally in the last year, and rough sleeping in London is up 8%. Shapps has promised funding to resolve homelessness but this money is a drop in an ocean of chaos; it will be wiped out by cuts elsewhere.

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer wants to exempt abandoned properties from clause 130. There are nearly 930,000 empty homes in the UK, of which more than 350,000 have been empty for over six months. Now that is a scandal that the government should ponder; in the meantime, we have the victims to punish.

How Cameron's NHS cheats waiting-list figures

A hospital clerk ordered to lie to patients reveals a rampant culture of deviousness in the NHS that forced her to quit

David Cameron and his health secretary, Andrew Lansley, meet nurses during a visit to the Royal Salford Hospital in Manchester in January. Photograph: John Giles/PA

David Cameron blocks his ears to inconvenient NHS truths, conferring only with supporters. Journalists are barred from hearing what staff tell him on his photo-opportunity hospital visits. Tuesday's Guardian poll shows how far he has lost the public trust he tried so hard to win on the NHS.

He should meet Carol, who has just quit after 17 years as a waiting-list clerk. She got in touch to express her disgust at what she was ordered to do. When she protested to a senior manager, he said this was happening around the country, so I won't reveal her hospital, unfairly picking on just one. This foundation trust boasts on its home page: "In these days of patient choice, it is more important than ever before to listen carefully to the views of our patients." But their patients' views might be unprintable if they knew how far political imperatives have overridden and warped medical priorities.

The national target says 90% of patients must be treated within 18 weeks of first referral by a GP. With annual budget cuts of 4% for the next four years, that's a tall order as the NHS undergoes its greatest ever upheaval. Just to survive, the NHS always needs 2.5% above inflation, so most professional observers think it will erupt: already 18-week waits are up 43%. Waiting-list clerks are at the sharp end where the cash crunch meets the impossible target – and here's what Carol says she was ordered to do:

She was told to cancel operations for anyone who was already waiting over 18 weeks, and instead to fill that theatre time with people closest to breaching the 18-week limit. "I was told to call people who had already gone over the 18 weeks and pretend there was no longer theatre time for their operation, and not give them a new date." She was told not to book anyone already in breach until April and the start of the next financial year, or to book only one for every nine still under the target. Instead she was told to fill theatre slots with as many short, minor operations as possible.

Next she was told to use devious means for knocking people off the waiting list. The worst was when she was told to call a mother of three young children to offer her a short-notice slot for Christmas Eve, knowing she would refuse and so could be knocked off the list for refusing. "We would offer operations at very short notice to people getting near the 18-week deadline. You hope they'd say no so you count them as a refusal and knock them off."

She protested first to her line manager, then to the one above and finally to the one above that. "I said I wanted these instructions in writing before I would lie to patients. Of course they said it could never be written down. But the manager in charge of operating theatres said other hospitals were all doing it, so we had to too. There's no other way to stay within target." Did the consultants know? "One complained, really upset at not getting patients seen according to priority of need, but they bullied him and he was told to be quiet. They warned that Monitor inspectors would put us on alert."

Cameron's new ban on mixed-sex wards after a long Daily Mail campaign has made matters far worse. He boasts that mixed-sex wards are now virtually gone. Carol's hospital trust boasts the same on its front page. She says: "Take rheumatology. People come in for one day for injections for pain, with a session once a month. Now it has to be men one month, women the next. Sometimes there might be just four men, say, and the other places are wasted. Many have to wait two months not one month now." This is what happens when political gimmickry is put before health need.

When Labour was driving down waiting times, there were similar stories of gaming and tricks: some A&E departments roped off corners and called them "wards" to keep within a four-hour trolley wait. "There was a bit of it then," Carol says, "but nothing, absolutely nothing, like what's happening now. I started in the early 1990s when there were two-year-long waits, and I've seen them drop so fast in the past 10 years. Now managers are deciding lots of patients are 'not in clinical need'. But a builder who can't work waiting for a hernia operation is in need, isn't he?"

Carol was so shocked she walked away after registering her complaint. In her last weeks she was allowed not to phone her own 18-week waiters and cancel their operations – but, she says, "everyone else still had to do it". "Clinical need is forgotten. It's all about managing the figures now."

Professor John Appleby of the King's Fund health thinktank says he hears of waiting-list cheating from many hospitals and will suggest the National Audit Office investigates. The government on Monday claimed credit for figures showing A&E use is falling due to better GP commissioning. Appleby says it has nothing to do with a GP system not yet in place: the last government began fining A&Es treating too many people, so hospitals now channel more patients straight into annexed GP clinics – good practice, but nonsense figures.

Targets always tempt statistical massaging, but the extremity of this cheating means no waiting-list figures can be trusted. As the NHS enters a period of austerity that the former health secretary Stephen Dorrell says no other OECD health system has tried, honesty is essential. Doctors and managers do their best, but if asked the impossible they must say so openly and transparently. Voters deserve to know the truth. So, whistleblowers, please get in touch.

The paradox of Rick Santorum's conservative beliefs

Santorum's supporters denounce the government's religious interference, but it's their mantra that feels like oppression

Rick Santorum campaigning in Michigan last week. Photograph: James Fassinger

I can't imagine that anyone on the Obama re-election team ever thought they'd be so lucky as to run against Rick Santorum; even now, one senses a kind of incredulous bemusement among when they are asked to respond to the former senator's more strident remarks.

They can rise above Santorum's social conservative mud-slinging without raising a sweat. Last Sunday, Robert Gibbs, an Obama campaign adviser, used Santorum's accusation that the president had a "phony theology" to plea for civility. We have to, Gibbs said, "get rid of this mindset in our politics that, if we disagree, we have to question character and faith," an assertion that appeals to a conviction that most Americans cling to more strongly than any religious affiliation: the right to be left alone.

As I've written before, I think it's Santorum's comfort with judging (and interfering with) the private lives of others that raises the hackles of voters who don't already agree with him. Social conservatives, Santorum chief among them, have tried to paint the administration's support for mandatory coverage of birth control by insurance companies as an imposition of beliefs on its own. When Santorum claims that the policy means that Obama "has reached a new low in this country's history of oppressing religious freedom that we have never seen before," he's relying on American's long-held distrust of government to blind us to real-life workings of the policy he describes. In practice, it's preventing people from using their insurance to cover birth control costs that feels like government interference, on the way to oppression.

The ability to control when and if we have children isn't a luxury anymore, it's a right as fundamental to our understanding of personal freedom that I'm not even sure most voters give it a second thought. Involving insurance companies, and employers, complicates the issue somewhat for some people – but not so much that it makes the president's policy unpopular.

Believing that employer-subsidized birth control is "a new low in oppressing religious freedom" requires perverting the meaning of "religious freedom" such that it actually means "only my religion," a singleness of vision that Americans just don't share.

As a country, we are more tolerant of religious diversity than most clerics of any stripe would prefer: 70% of Americans who claim affiliation with a particular denomination agree that "many religions can lead to eternal life," an admirable expression of broadmindedness but kind of a buzzkill as far as unique selling propositions go.

Santorum is on record supporting his particular flavor of worship as a killer app; mainline Protestants, he's said, are "gone from the world of Christianity as I see it" – the closest we'll get to an admission of his impossibly narrow vision. Almost all of Santorum's opinions on social issues require a kind of intellectual blinders to make sense, some of them might even demand a different set for each eye. He wants to make divorce more difficult but believes marriage is making babies – a set of positions that logically leads to the kind of unhappy families that make people avoid marriage. He is adamant in opposition to abortion but balks at providing women with prenatal care.

These positions are as almost as unpopular as they are nonsensical: Americans' support for same-sex marriage grows year by year, and refusing to pay for indigent women's pre-natal care can lead some pregnant women to abortion.

Santorum is ahead in national polls on the strength of his meaningless wins in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota and, more to the point, not being Mitt Romney. This election cycle has shown again and again that Republican candidates rise in the polls only to sink again once the public gets to know them. Santorum has undeniable appeal: he is passionate, earnest, genuine and eloquent when it comes to his beliefs. Unfortunately, the more people find out about those beliefs, the more they will see not just how different they are, but how the beliefs themselves encourage the suppression of difference, whatever appeals to freedom he might make.

Obama's supporters can only hope that Santorum embraces freedom of expression, when it comes to religion or anything else, as broadly as possible, and keeps talking.

We need to know who funds these thinktank lobbyists

The battle for democracy is becoming a fight against backroom billionaires seeking to shape politics to suit their own interests

Consultant Frank Luntz's technique was pioneered by tobacco firms: teach the ‘controversy' in schools. Photograph: Jeffrey Blackler / Alamy/Alamy

Shocking, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove. The Heartland Institute, which has helped lead the war against climate science in the United States, is funded among others by tobacco firms, fossil fuel companies and one of the billionaire Koch brothers.

It appears to have followed the script written by a consultant to the Republican party, Frank Luntz, in 2002. "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."

Luntz's technique was pioneered by the tobacco companies and the creationists: teach the controversy. In other words, insist that the question of whether cigarettes cause lung cancer, natural selection drives evolution, or burning fossil fuels causes climate change, is still wide open, and that both sides of the "controversy" should be taught in schools and thrashed out in the media.

The leaked documents appear to show that, courtesy of its multimillionaire donors, the institute has commissioned a global warming curriculum for schools which teaches that "whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy" and "whether CO₂ is a pollutant is controversial".

The institute has claimed it is "a genuinely independent source of research and commentary" and that "we do not take positions in order to appease or avoid losing support from individual donors". But the documents, if authentic, reveal that its attacks on climate science have been largely funded by a single anonymous donor and that "we are extinguishing primarily global warming projects in pace with declines in his giving".

The climate change deniers it funds have made similar claims to independence. For example, last year Fred Singer told a French website: "Of course I am not funded by the fossil fuel lobbies. It's a completely absurd invention." The documents suggest that the institute, funded among others by the coal company Murray Energy, the the oil company Marathon and the former Exxon lobbyist Randy Randol has been paying him $5,000 a month.

Robert Carter has claimed he "receives no research funding from special interest organisations". But the documents suggest that Heartland pays him $1,667 a month. Among the speakers at its conferences were two writers for the Telegraph (Christopher Booker and James Delingpole). The Telegraph group should now reveal whether and how much they were paid by the Heartland Institute.

It seems to be as clear an illustration as we have yet seen of the gulf between what such groups call themselves and what they really are. Invariably, organisations arguing for regulations to be removed, top taxes to be reduced and other such billionaire-friendly policies, call themselves free-market or conservative thinktanks. But according to David Frum, formerly a fellow at one such group – the American Enterprise Institute – they "increasingly function as public relations agencies". The message they send to their employees, he says, is "we don't pay you to think, we pay you to repeat".

The profits of polluting or reckless companies and banks and the vast personal fortunes of their beneficiaries are largely dependent on the regulations set by governments. This is why the "thinktanks" campaign for small government. If regulations robustly defend the public interest, the profits decline. If they are weak, the profits rise. Billionaires and big business buy influence to insulate themselves from democratic control. It seems to me that the so-called thinktanks are an important component of this public relations work.

Their funding, in most cases, is opaque. When I challenged some of the most prominent of such groups in the UK, only one would reveal its donors' identity. The others refused. Disgracefully, their lack of accountability does not prevent some of them from registering as charities and claiming tax exemption.

The Charity Commission in England and Wales – negligent, asleep at the wheel – is becoming a threat to democracy. These organisations are not trying to restore historic buildings or rescue distressed donkeys. They are seeking to effect political change in highly contentious areas. The minimum requirement for all such groups – whether they are on the left or on the right – is that they should disclose their major sources of income so that we know on whose behalf they speak. The commission is providing cover for multimillionaires and corporations who are funding undisclosed campaigns to enhance their own wealth under the guise of charity, and obliging the rest of us to pay for it through tax exemptions. If that's charity, a police siren is music.

The use of so-called thinktanks on both sides of the Atlantic seems to me to mirror the use of super-political action committees (superPACs) in the US. Since the supreme court removed the limits on how much one person could give to a political campaign, the billionaires have achieved almost total control over politics. An article last week on TomDispatch revealed that in 2011, just 196 donors provided nearly 80% of the money raised by superPACs.

The leading Republican candidates have all but abandoned the idea of mobilising popular support. Instead they use the huge funds they raise from billionaires to attack the credibility of their opponents through television ads. Yet more money is channelled through 501c4 groups – tax-exempt bodies supposedly promoting social welfare – which (unlike the superPACs) don't have to reveal the identity of their donors. TomDispatch notes that "serving as a secret slush fund for billionaires evidently now qualifies as social welfare."

The money wins. This is why Republicans swept up so many seats in the mid-term elections, and why the surviving Democrats were scarcely distinguishable from their rivals. It is why Obama, for all his promise, appears incapable of governing in the public interest. What can he tell the banks: "Do what I say or I won't take your money any more"? How can he tax the billionaires when they have their hands around his throat? Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

This is plutocracy, pure and simple. The battle for democracy is now a straight fight against the billionaires and corporations reshaping politics to suit their interests. The first task of all democrats must be to demand that any group, of any complexion, seeking to effect political change should reveal its funders.

Jeremy Lin row reveals deep-seated racism against Asian Americans

The racist language directed at the NBA Asian American basketball player has been quite something to behold

New York Knicks player Jeremy Lin. Photograph: Adam Hunger/Reuters

Of the many questions that have been asked about the jaw-dropping success of the New York Knicks' Jeremy Lin, who went from a barely known basketball player to one of the most famous athletes in America in a single game, one that has yet to be posed is: what is the connection between Lin and Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's? While that aesthetically beautiful but morally bankrupt film is primarily remembered for Audrey Hepburn's Givenchy wardrobe, it is Rooney's turn as the speech-impaired upstairs neighbour, Mr Yunioshi, that, for me, really gives the movie its true flavour. It's hard to call a film glamorous when it features a white actor playing an Asian stereotype that would put a Tintin cartoon to shame.

Which brings us back to Lin. Lin is an Asian American NBA basketball player, a first-generation son of Taiwanese immigrants and a Harvard graduate, the American dream given athletic form. Until 4 February, few even knew his name, but after that evening's game against the New Jersey Nets, in which he scored 25 points, and his continuing near-superhuman run of form ever since, the whole of New York and the American press entered into a state of "Linsanity" to the point that Lin is trying to trademark the coinage.

There have been high-profile Asian-American athletes before, Michelle Kwan and Tiger Woods being the most obvious. There have also been Asian players in the NBA before, such as the now-retired 7ft 6in Yao Ming. But Lin is the first American in the league of Chinese or Taiwanese descent and this, it turns out, has been a difficult concept for some to grasp.

One shouldn't expect thoughtful sensitivity from professional athletes or the most hysterical wing of the sports media, but the racist language and even flat-out racism directed at Lin has been quite something to behold.

"Chink in the armor" was ESPN's take not once but twice when the Knicks lost a game last week, both as a headline added by ESPN writer Anthony Federico and then as a phrase used by the anchor Max Bretos (Federico has since been fired and Bretos received a 30-day suspension.) Those two muppets look the height of sophisticated decorum compared with Foxsports.com writer Jason Whitlock, whose response to Lin's triumph over the Lakers on Friday night was to tweet "Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple inches of pain tonight", a comment notable for being almost more misogynistic than racist. When the Madison Square Garden Network flashed up a photo of Lin, it superimposed it with a fortune cookie, presumably refraining from adding some chopsticks purely because it didn't have the graphics.

Welterweight Floyd Mayweather has never been a modern-day Emily Post but his tweeted thought on Lin last week – "Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he's Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don't get the praise" – was impressive even by his standards. Also, "don't get the praise"? Come on, Floyd, you came ninth in Dancing with the Stars! How much more praise do you want?

Nor does one need to look to the morons for examples. Chinstroking journal the Atlantic put forward the charming theory that Lin's success is due to his "philosophical heritage" – ah, so! And so inscrutable, too!

Racism in sport is nothing new, as anyone familiar with English football could tell you. But Lin's high-profile success has highlighted a different problem, that of racism against Asian Americans in general. While no one would claim that racism against black people is no longer a problem in America, it is unthinkable that any news network or even half-brained TV presenter would use racial slurs against a black player equivalent to the Asian ones that have been used against Lin. This is because racism against Asians is not confronted as much and therefore is somehow seen as more acceptable – not even racist, even.

A survey last year found that Asian American teenagers suffered far more bullying at school than any other demographic: 54% of Asian-American teenagers reported being bullied compared with 31.3% of white teens and 38.4% of black ones. In an extraordinary article in New York magazine last year, Wesley Yang wrote that to be an Asian American means being not just part of a "barely distinguishable" mass of "people who are good at math and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally".

Asian Americans are, without question, barely represented culturally. Black roles in Hollywood are still by and large limited to maids, drug dealers and James Earl Jones, but Asian roles are invariable limited to camp villains, martial arts experts, dippy shop owners and exchange students soundtracked with a gong.

So the answer to what connects Mickey Rooney and Jeremy Lin is that both reveal a side of America that even this most racially aware country tends to ignore. The difference is that Rooney encouraged those stereotypes, Lin overturns them, yet the response remains the same.

He has a dagger and a revolver – is there any zakaah on them?

My father has a dagger and a licensed revolver. I want to ask: is there any zakaah due on them?.

Praise be to Allaah.

No zakaah is required of a person for what he owns of weapons, animals, clothing and the like, unless it is for trade. The evidence for that is the words of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him): “No zakaah is due from the Muslim for his slave or his horse.” Narrated by Muslim (982). 

Al-Nawawi (may Allaah have mercy on him) said: This hadeeth is the basis of the principle that no zakaah is due on one’s own property, and no zakaah is due on horses and slaves if they are not for trade. End quote from Sharh Muslim. 

One's own wealth means that which a person keeps to make use of and benefit from, not for purposes of trade. On this basis, no zakaah is due on the dagger and revolver, unless they are prepared for sale, in which case zakaah is due on them. See also the answer to question no. 65515 for information on how to pay zakaah on trade goods. 

It should be noted that the dagger may be made of silver or plated with gold. If the gold or silver in it reaches the nisaab (minimum threshold) then zakaah is due on it; or if it is less than the nisaab but the owner has other gold or silver that reaches the nisaab when put together with it, then zakaah is also due on it. 

But if the gold or silver in it is less than the nisaab and the owner has no other gold or silver, then no zakaah is due on it. 

The scholars of the Standing Committee were asked: is a personal weapon such as a rifle, revolver or sword subject to zakaah, and how should it be paid? 

They replied: 

No zakaah is due on that because it is not prepared for trade. But if there is any gold on the sword etc that reaches the nisaab by itself or when added to other gold that he owns, then he must pay zakaah, according to the more correct of the two scholarly opinions, as is the case with jewellery. End quote. 

Fataawa al-Lajnah al-Daa’imah (9/276) 

And Allaah knows best.

Is it obligatory to pay zakaah on money loaned to someone who is going through difficulties or who is delaying repayment?

What is the ruling on paying zakaah on money loaned to someone who is going through difficulties and may take years to repay? What is the ruling on paying zakaah on money loaned to a rich man who is delaying repayment? What is the ruling on a loan given to someone who one knows is rich and will pay it back – of course, after one year has passed?

Praise be to Allaah.

If the debtor is going through difficulty or is rich but is delaying repayment, and it is not possible to get the money back from him, either because there is not sufficient evidence to get the matter resolved through the courts, or because one has evidence but the authorities will not help him to get it back, as is the cases in some countries where the authorities do not support people’s rights, zakaah does not have to be paid until the loan is recovered and one hijri year has passed. If, however, the debtor is rich and it is possible to recover the loan, then it is obligatory to pay zakaah on the money each time a year passes, if the loan reaches the level of nisaab either by itself or when added to one’s other money and other wealth.

Allaah is the Source of strength. May Allaah bless our Prophet Muhammad and his family and companions.

Zakaah on company shares

Zakaah on company shares

I hope that you can give me an idea about how to pay zakaah on shares, and if the company already pays zakaah, am I obliged to pay zakaah too?

Praise be to Allaah.  

The zakaah on shares is obligatory upon the owners of the shares. It may be paid on their behalf by the company if that is stated in the company’s constitution, or it is decided by the board of directors, or if the law of the land obliges companies to pay zakaah, or if the shareholder authorizes the company to pay zakaah on his shares. 

Secondly:

The company should pay zakaah on the shares just as an individual pays zakaah on his wealth, in the sense that all the money of the shareholders is to be considered like the wealth of one person, and zakaah is calculated on that basis, depending on the category of wealth on which zakaah is obligatory, the nisaab (minimum threshold), the amount on which zakaah is to be paid, and other matters which are to be taken into account with regard to the zakaah to be paid by an individual. This is based on the principle of khultah (collectivity), according to the fuqaha’ who apply this to all kinds of wealth, excluding the amount of shares on which zakaah is not obligatory, such as shares belonging to the public treasury, charitable waqfs, charitable organizations, and shares belonging to non-Muslims. 

Thirdly:

If the company does not pay zakaah on its wealth for any reason, then the shareholders are obliged to pay zakaah on their shares. If the shareholder can find out from the company’s statements how much the company would have to pay in zakaah if it did pay zakaah in the manner described above, then he should pay zakaah on that basis, because this is the basic principle with regard to paying zakaah on shares. 

If the shareholder is not able to find that out: 

If he holds shares in the company with the intention of benefiting from the annual profits of the shares, and not for the purpose of trading in those shares, then he should pay the zakaah similar to that paid on things that are rented out, in accordance with the resolution of the Islamic Fiqh Council (Majma’ al-Fiqh al-Islami) passed during its second session, with regard to the zakaah on real-estate and non-agricultural land that is rented out. The owner of these shares does not pay zakaah on the value of the shares, rather he pays zakaah on the profits, which is 2.5% after one year has passed from the day when he acquired that profit, bearing in mind the conditions of zakaah and provided that there are no impediments.

 If the shareholder bought the shares with the intention of trading, then the zakaah on the shares is the same as zakaah on trade goods. If one year has passed and they are still in his possession then he should pay zakaah on the value of the shares, based on the evaluation of experts, and he should pay 2.5% of that value and of the profit, if the shares have made any profit. 

Fourthly: 

If the shareholder sells his shares during the year, he should include their price in his wealth and pay zakaah on it after one year has passed. The purchaser should pay zakaah on the shares that he has bought in the manner described above. And Allaah knows best.

Zakaat on income earned during the year

Aslam Al Akham
If one has us$ 10,000 above the nisab at the beginning of the Zakat year and by end of that year he earns another Us$ 5,000. Therefore making it US$ 15,000 . But the extra 5,000 have not been in his possession for a full zakat year. Is the Zakat then payable on the 10,000 only or on 15 ,000.
Please clarify.
Thank You


It is not obligatory that zakat be paid on wealth until after the year ends. This refers to the $10,000. That is unless the additional money, which has come after the beginning of the year is a result and proceeds from the original money. This would make this money have the same zakat status, and you would then have to pay zakat on the entire $15,000

Zakaah on loans which may not be repaid

A person has money which he lent to some of his brothers and acquaintances, and he may or may not get it back. He is asking whether he has to pay zakaah on it.

Praise be to Allaah.

If a person is owed money by a rich man that reaches the amount of the nisaab, or when added to the money he has would bring the amount up to the nisaab, he must pay zakaah on it, and when he gets the money back he should pay zakaah for the time that has passed, whether it is a year or more. If he pays zakaah on it before he gets it, that is fine. If the person who owes the money is not rich, he should pay zakaah one year after he gets the money, even if more than a year has passed. This is one opinion reported from Imaam Ahmad; it is also the opinion of Maalik and of Shaykh Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhaab (may Allaah have mercy on him). Allaah is the Source of strength. May Allaah bless our Prophet Muhammad and his family and companions.

The NHS is a professional service ripe for re-engineering

Our healthcare system will only survive if it allows private companies and others to innovate, increase quality and drive down costs

'GPs provide a great example of how healthcare professionals can be freed to own and deliver their own services.' Photograph: RayArt Graphics/Alamy

The health and social care bill will be the subject of heated debate at its report stage in the House of Lords today. Yet the real healthcare issue should be less about the NHS landscape in the next three years, and more about the survival of our universal and equitable healthcare system for the next three decades.

The £20bn deficit facing the NHS in the next three years is undoubtedly important, but the elephant in the room is the sustainability of the sector.

In Britain, we spent about £40bn on healthcare in 2000. Around 10 years later, we are spending near to £120bn. Economic value is defined as quality divided by price. We have tripled the denominator of the value equation. Yet it is hard to claim the nominator – defined as clinical results and patient experience in healthcare – has kept pace.

We have been here before in Britain. When any sector has become unsustainable, we have brought down barriers to entry, stopped artificially pumping up the outdated, and allowed new entrants to come up with new solutions and flourish ahead of our global competitors. As a result, we have in our small country of 60 million people some of the world's most successful telecommunication, retail, financial, creative and professional services.

The NHS, too, is a professional service now ripe for re-engineering. By contrast, manufacturing teaches us a salutary lesson. When we protect our old industries with subsidies and inflexible legislation, we risk losing all. British factories are now predominantly foreign-owned.

When innovation is needed in a sector, it is understandable that those involved in the current system feel insecure about their future. Yet neither incumbent organisations nor employees should fear the opening up of their sector to new ideas, because both tend to do better in sectors where Britain stays ahead of the global rejuvenation curve. Just contrast the fate of the British telecommunications industry and its participants with that of the once-mighty British Leyland.

Liberating a sector is simply about giving professionals the liberty to create a new chapter in their profession. In healthcare, the future will be created by people who are delivering the services today. We should therefore spend less energy safeguarding existing structures and institutions and focus more on freeing their participants to create the new.

Of course, with freedom comes responsibility. Concerns over independent companies competing with the public sector often centre on accountability and profit. It is true that some lost their way in recent years in the quest for profit. Profit for an enterprise is like oxygen, food and water for the body: necessary to sustain life, but not the point of life. Just as the entire public sector can not be condemned for the failure at Mid Staffordshire hospital, it is wrong to judge every non-state operator according to the actions of a guilty few. The key here is the accountability of all operators to public scrutiny.

In fact, the search for new solutions in healthcare gives us a great opportunity to create a fairer society. At the moment, two single square miles – the City and Whitehall – control over 90% of our productive assets. This concentration of ownership is unique among developed countries, and has produced unacceptable consequences. For instance, the richest region in Germany is two times more prosperous than the poorest; in France this ratio is four times; in the United States five times; in Britain it is a shameful 10 times.

Healthcare professionals must be empowered to set up their own alternatives. GPs provide a great example of how healthcare professionals can be freed to own and deliver their own services. They set up and own their practices, and sell their services back to the NHS as single-handed practitioners or small partnerships. This model could be expanded to nurses, midwives, hospital consultants and countless others, so that many more professionals could come up with new solutions that they control for their patients.

Our healthcare system is on an unsustainable trajectory. The solution is fundamental innovation that increases quality and reduces costs. We need charities, mutuals, private companies and public sector organisations all to participate to give us the greatest chance of rejuvinating our NHS for future generations. The country that pioneered the first antibiotic, the first blood transfusion and the first universal health service should still be a place where the brightest minds can create the boldest solutions.

Deport Abu Qatada: or if not, give him the law's full protection

Qatada champions al-Qaida and delights in terrorist outrages. But Britain is robust enough to tolerate madcap clerics

There is no argument. The Muslim cleric Abu Qatada is as unpleasant a character as ever graced Britain's shores. Wanted on terrorism charges in eight countries, including his own of Jordan, his championing of al-Qaida and his delight in terrorist outrages puts him beyond any reasonable pale. He propounds violence and seeks to corrupt the young. There is no obligation on any country to tolerate such a guest. He is a citizen of Jordan and has forfeited any serious claim on the hospitality of the British judicial system.

As for the European court of human rights, its role in helping him avoid deportation is otiose. The convention it claims ponderously to enforce prohibits anyone's removal to places where there is "a real risk" of torture. No one says Abu Qatada risks torture, so the court, frantic to administer Eurosceptic Britain a bloody nose, conflates opposition to torture with article six on getting "a fair trial", where a plaintiff might be vulnerable to evidence derived from torturing someone else. The fair trial article is so vague it could plausibly be invoked against any justice system. The ECHR is bogged down in empire-building and is a mess.

That the risk of Qatada not getting a fair trial back home in Jordan should override the risk of his continued pro-terrorist activities in Britain is inherently absurd. Meanwhile, the government's failure to win deportation – permitted by British judges up to the supreme court – is justifying Britain's increasingly odious methods of holding Qatada and others like him in various forms of detention, without the necessity of bringing them to trial.

The antics of Whitehall lawyers in Belmarsh jail are like those of President Obama in Guantánamo Bay. This week they found themselves in the bizarre position of being ordered by a judge to release Qatada on "control order" bail, with total release in three months if there was no progress in the negotiations to have him face trial in Jordan. This is under rules that the Home Office itself drew up. The result has been a real crisis of confidence between judges and public opinion. Ministers might reflect that it is easy to stray from the rule of law, but hard to retrace one's steps.

I can't see why the government does not dump Qatada on the next plane to Amman and have done with him. He has been declared a public menace, and charged with a serious offence back home. Britain is entitled to treat the ECHR finding as advisory and put its security first. Qatada broke his last bail condition and is as cast-iron a candidate for expulsion as can be imagined. The ECHR can go eat muesli.

So far so simple. But there are deeper implications to this affair. While I would happily deport Qatada, as long as he is in this country he is entitled to the full protection of the law. Lord Hoffmann in the 2004 law lords' "Belmarsh judgment" warned parliament that the steady erosion of habeas corpus and extension of detention without trial threatened "the very existence of an ancient liberty of which this country has until now been proud: freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention". That liberty also extends to free speech, however odious.

The judgment was opposed by the then home secretary, Charles Clarke – one of a succession of ministers who have struggled and failed to marry Westminster's weak commitment to civil liberty with the howling of the securocrats and media for extrajudicial action. Clarke sought refuge behind parliamentary sovereignty, code for securocrat capture. The illiberal Home Office misses no chance to extend executive discretion.

Britain's post-9/11 edifice of detention without trial is the judicial detritus of George Bush and Tony Blair's war on terror, a specious conflation of two quite different concepts: a random terrorist act, and a realistic threat to state security. A smokescreen of paranoid spin-smothered civil liberties with headline-grabbing authoritarian initiatives. It created a new category of political criminals who could be locked up peremptorily as enemies of the state. Like the red menace during the cold war, the war on terror was a naked exploitation of the politics of fear.

Since the outrages in New York and London in the last decade, successful bomb attacks on western cities have been remarkably few. They have been prevented not by aggression against distant regimes but by intelligence and sound policing. Even if some bombers were to "get through", it abuses common sense to portray them as threats to the security or stability of the nation, let alone to what Blair called "western civilisation as we know it". When ministers waffle about criminals in such grandiose terms, we should worry not about the criminals but about the sanity of ministers and the company they keep.

Qatada clearly incited others to criminal acts, which merits his arrest and trial or, on a lower threshold of evidence, his deportation. What he and his activities surely do not merit is the continued suspension of the rule of law, or of freedom of speech under the shrill catch-all of "hate crime".

Some preachers peddle messages so crazed as to merit surveillance. But Britain is robust enough to survive the occasional outrage and not cede freedom to the grim citadels of a police state. Its conduits of argument, education and information are robust enough to tolerate a few madcap clerics. I cannot believe Qatada is worth the fuss. If we cannot expel him, leave his ranting to the wayward disciplines of democracy and watchful eye of Scotland Yard.

Faith at Liverpool's frontline: The 'big society' in action - video

Good work. I suppose even faith related actions can be good. But generally speaking too much faith is evil. I met a couple who go from Netherlands to South Africa to help the poor blacks. Distributing food and encouraging them to become Christians is more like salesmanship. These people remain poor after the givers are gone. But many change the faith to Christianity.
I prefer the help which helps people stand on their feet without strings attached. And change circumstances for the girls to choose another profession.

Could this be the church to calm our secularist outrage?

Evangelical worship gets many on the left hostile or awkward. So how do we respond to believers that save the destitute?

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Could this be the church to calm our secularist outrage?

Evangelical worship gets many on the left hostile or awkward. So how do we respond to believers that save the destitute?

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Watch John Harris's visit to Liverpool's Frontline Church Link to this video

It's a particularly remarkable feature of modern British life: the way that in certain circles even the mention of the most modest form of theistic belief is enough to bring down great torrents of hostility. Often the explanation is traceable to the liberal-left's justified concerns about the blurred relationship between religion and state. But, in keeping with the drive of militant secularism to attack the very idea of God as much as what faith means in practice, much of the shouting is usually about philosophical fundamentals. The result: an ongoing scrap between equally staunch believers and non-believers, which arguably gets nobody anywhere.

When we asked our online readers to give us a steer as to the social role played by religion where they lived, it all kicked off again. "I don't trust anyone who needs an instruction manual to tell them how to be good," offered Newbunkie. "My personal view is that all religious groups should be banned," said someone called Youbloodydidwhat.

In response there were slightly more measured claims of religion's practical benefits. "I have seen churches set up hostels for the homeless because the local vicar has encountered so many people sleeping rough in the church porch," wrote JonathanBW. "[They] establish credit unions to help people who are financially excluded … Most of this work does not involve any element of evangelism or proselytising." Similar news came from Manchester, Northampton and Glasgow – and in response, members of the Dawkins-Hitchens tribe dutifully went ape again.

If many of them set foot in Liverpool's Frontline Church, they would presumably explode. It's a standalone evangelical organisation based on the forlorn-looking borders of Picton and Wavertree. Having arrived in Liverpool in 1991, it now draws about 1,000 people – whose average age seems to be around 35 – to the three services staged each Sunday. Recent visitors have included Nick Clegg, Chris Grayling and Cherie Blair; among the first members of the congregation I met the day I visited was a local Labour councillor. Here, God is not acknowledged in that rather bashful way one associates with the tea-and-biscuits model of Anglicanism but loudly saluted. "We are amazed by you," goes one part of the apparently ad hoc liturgy. "We are in awe of you."

Now, I am an unshakeable agnostic. There is something about the unabashed nature of evangelical Christianity that unsettles my very British sensibilities – and I reach my peak of awkwardness during a Sunday service that dispenses with the fusty business of hymns and holy communion, and instead builds itself on music that suggests a grim hybrid of Snow Patrol and LeAnn Rimes. There are collection buckets rather than plates; suggesting that Rymans may have an overlooked sacramental aspect, the flock are invited to write their highest thoughts on Post-It notes, which are then stuck to flip charts.

Drawing on the Book of Joshua, the presiding pastor, a former Bristol GP named Nic Harding, advises his audience to fix their sights on metaphorical mountains, parts of society where their beliefs might be brought to bear. The examples he offers might chill any non-believer to the bone: "Education, healthcare, politics, government – these are all areas where God says, 'Who will claim that mountain?'"

In fact any mention of current affairs brings nonplussed responses from the congregation, and even the pastor tells me that politics is too "top down", and that he wants instead to work against greed and individualism one soul at a time. By way of bowing to the inevitable, I also ask him about the place his church gives to such issues as abortion and gay rights. "To me, those issues are right on the margin of the things we should be focusing on," he says. "The real issues are how we should express and find love for the outcasts and the downtrodden."

This is where he and his people direct their work, as evidenced by Streetwise, a weekly operation in which a handful of volunteers take food, tea and condoms to the city's sex workers. I watch them spend three hours in the encroaching dark as women in various states of drug-related distress flit between their van and streets where money has to be snatched from the jaws of occasionally life-threatening danger. They sometimes quietly pray for those they help, but they don't evangelise. "We're not bible-bashing," one of them tells me. "Whether these girls come to church or not, it makes no difference to how we treat them."

The next day I meet a former sex worker, now apparently off drugs, set on somehow starting college and a regular Frontline worshipper. "I was a prostitute and a drug addict for 11, 12 years – maybe more," she tells me. "God is so forgiving – he wants me to win." Wider society, she says, is "too judgmental … it's: 'That's a prostitute, that's a drug addict.' They don't want to know." And how has the church helped her? "Oh, it saved my life," she shoots back. "I would be dead if it wasn't for this church."

A question soon pops into my head. How does a militant secularist weigh up the choice between a cleaned-up believer and an ungodly crack addict? Back at my hotel I search the atheistic postings on the original Comment is free thread for even the hint of an answer, but I can't find one anywhere.

Where next for our series about life beyond Whitehall?

Anywhere but Westminster is six months old – tell us exactly where we should go next, and what you think the story should be

We want your stories to be the antidote to the world as seen from Westminster. Photograph: Tim Ireland/PA

Comment is free's Anywhere but Westminster series has now been running for six months. In our quest to take the temperature of Britain in 2011 and explore the increasing gaps between politics and real life, we've focused on an array of big issues, and been to villages, towns and cities in England, Scotland and Wales.

We've also been developing the crowdsourcing ideas on which the series is based. For our coverage of library closures, we visited North Yorkshire at the suggestion of a Comment is free user who had posted on the initial thread. In Inverness, we built part of our story about rising Scottish optimism around the Global Energy group for the same reason – as well as inviting the SNP to respond to some of your comments. The film and article about low pay in London and Swansea drew on the views and experiences of Comment is free users, as did our last story, about evangelical Christianity and social activism in Liverpool.

When we began the series, a first appeal for ideas and suggestions said this:

"We want to look at social changes that mainstream politicians always seem to understand long after they've happened. So, if where you live is changing fast, or stuck in a rut – or, just to maintain a note of optimism, being taken somewhere different by the efforts of people on the ground – we want to know."

That still stands: this series is meant to be the antidote to the world as seen from Westminster and Whitehall, so if you think there's a story that says something about where Britain is actually going, let us know.

So, a renewed appeal. This series is about society, and the economy, and what it is to live and work in modern Britain. Both culturally and geographically, the further we are from SW1, the better things seem to get. So: where should we go next, and what's the story? This time, we're after specific ideas rather than views and opinions. We'll be regularly on the thread ourselves. And if you'd rather email than post here, you can contact

Morecambe has too much history to be one of austerity's casualties

The failed regeneration of Morecambe is a depressing example of how the private sector cannot thrive if the state's hacked back

Morecambe Bay: The town is struggling in its efforts to regenerate itself.

Eva Skawinska is 47. In her native Warsaw she worked as a hospital radiographer. Now she runs a restaurant on Morecambe seafront – Eva's, where the standard of food surpasses most of what you'd find in the average British town centre.

One problem: the business sits in the midst of what amounts to a huge but half-finished regeneration project, dealt blows by the recession and the austerity that has followed it. "We opened at a bad time," she says – and she's not wrong. If takings stay much the same, she tells me, Eva's won't remain open for much longer than a year.

Her story is presumably the same as that of scores of small-scale risk takers who took a punt on the revival of the English seaside – witness optimistic pre-recession talk about Hastings, Margate, Folkestone and more. The hope was that dreams dangled in property columns and Sunday supplements might somehow take flight, but they have often plunged earthwards, like those infamous birdmen on Bognor pier.

What's your experience of media misbehaviour?

As the phone-hacking scandal shines a light on press standards, tell us if media distortion has affected your neighbourhood

Private investigator Glenn Mulcaire was jailed for phone hacking. Photograph: Fiona Hanson/PA

The phone-hacking scandal has blown open no end of themes – not least, the standards of the press and the future of media regulation. With all that in mind, as the next Anywhere but Westminster instalment looms, we want to get into the nitty-gritty of what media misbehaviour means for people well away from either celebrity culture, or those elevated places where politicians mix with newspaper executives.

So, a question. Has some aspect of where you live been seriously misrepresented by the national press? Has a particular story been distorted beyond recognition, or told in terms of blatant falsehood?

Football: big money, big clubs, big problems?

As the season gets going, we want to know your thoughts about supporting smaller clubs and how finance affects the sport

FC United of Manchester describes itself as 'a community football club owned and democratically run by its 2,000-plus members'. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

A couple of weeks ago, we asked Comment is free users for their suggested examples of the way that the media often distorts local stories beyond recognition. Given that the riots had just started, the response was a little underwhelming: this is a subject to which we'll return, ideally before Christmas – so if you know of any story that fits the bill – we're talking about 'Asylum seekers eat swans' syndrome, essentially – please get in touch at anywherebutwestminster@gmail.com.

In the meantime, we're going to focus the next instalment on football. With the start of the 2011-12 season and the imminent closure of the transfer window, it's time to look at the effect that methods of modern business are having on the beautiful game. Massive sums are being spent, particularly by the kind of new arrivals in the top-flight represented by Manchester City. Manchester United have just part-floated on the Singapore stock exchange. Meanwhile, many clubs are struggling – though supporters are beginning to fight back via new models of mutualisation and community ownership (see the Supporters Direct initiative for details).

On Wednesday, we're going to the clash between Chester FC and FC United of Manchester, both representative of the new wave of football mutuals. We want to feed in as much opinion and information from Comment is free into our coverage as possible. So, some questions…

What's it like supporting a small club, particularly in the shadow of a Premiership giant? What's the appeal of allegiance to a lower-league side? Has where you live lost a football club, or is it in the midst of a fight to save one? Do you support a big club, and have concerns about what big money is doing to the experience of being a fan? And to what extent do you think that the mutual/community ownership option is the way to go?

We'll be back on the thread at regular intervals. Obviously.

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Battle of the fan-owned football clubs – video

Chester FC was formed by fans from the ashes of liquidated club Chester City last year. John Harris goes to watch their Evo-Stick Premier League clash against fellow co-op club FC United of Manchester and talks to those involved

In the Evo-Stik, fans can still tell a team from a business

If Premier League football is a cash-dominated farce, the rebellious optimism of supporter-owned clubs points to an alternative

'Top-level football looks exactly like a small globalised economy," offered one Comment is free user, and they didn't mean it as a compliment. "There is something inherently messed up about a competition that starts each year with 20 teams but only three or four of them ever have the potential to actually win," reckoned someone else. We had asked Cifers for their opinions about life in the game's less star-spangled layers – and inevitably, just about everyone was agreed on something so built into the national conversation that it seems to be a matter of firm consensus: that notwithstanding such jaw-droppers as Manchester United thrashing Arsenal 8-2, big money is so distorting the game that its upper tiers seem to have precious little to do with the unpredictable glories of great sport.

Of late, Uefa has introduced financial fair play rules aimed at forcing big clubs to break even and limit their spending; but plenty of sceptical voices still see the future of high-end football belonging to such teams as Chelsea, Manchester City – and FC Anzhi Makhachkala. Thanks to a local oligarch named Suleyman Kerimov, the Dagestan club have just signed Samuel Eto'o from Inter Milan for £22m and are paying him £330,000 a week to make sporting life in an unstable region just south of Chechnya that bit more palatable.

Meanwhile, whether new constraints on the sport's aristocracy work or not, in the case of scores of British clubs all that matters is simple survival. The super-teams of the Premier League tower over them, offering a kind of infinite gratification with which the stoicism of traditional football fandom can't compete. Falling into administration is an ongoing threat. But as an evening at the home ground of Chester FC proves, some clubs are brimming with a new kind of rebellious optimism. "Coming here is actually better than the Premier League," one fan tells me; that might be pushing it, but I can just about see his point.

Until the spring of 2010, the local team here were called Chester City. Founded in 1885, their history contained little more auspicious than once reaching the semi-finals of the League Cup, and in the TV age the success enjoyed by Liverpool sucked away their support. Towards the end of their existence, they were bedeviled by textbook mishap: a £7m debt, administration, an owner since ruled out of the game according to the Football Association's "fit and proper" regulations – and expulsion from the Conference League in February 2010. The club was formally liquidated a month later.

But those who wanted football to carry on here acted admirably quickly, and launched the new Chester FC as a "phoenix club". Crucially, it's a mutual: owned by its supporters, who can pay a minimum of £5 a season to become active shareholders. And it is not alone: the night I watched them play, their opponents in the Evo-Stik League premier division were the fan-owned FC United Of Manchester, founded in protest against the debt-laden misrule of the Glazer family. There is also AFC Wimbledon – whose fans took similar umbrage at their old club's move to Milton Keynes and are now back in the Football League – and, among others, Brentford, Exeter City, Cambridge City, and good old Runcorn Linnets.

Built around these teams is an ecosystem of support and sympathetic research. Supporters Direct, the body originally set up by the last government to encourage more accountable sports clubs, not only advises and lobbies but runs its own cup and pre-season shield competitions. The momentum they've acquired led to a pledge to encourage "co-operative ownership of football clubs by supporters" in last year's coalition agreement, though insiders say they now want some appreciable action. They're pushing for tax relief for fan-owned clubs. As soon as it becomes law, they want government and local authorities to aggressively use the provisions of the localism bill to identify football clubs as assets of community value, thus opening the way for mutualised local ownership. More generally, they're pushing for a sports law that will recognise that clubs amount to much more than privately owned businesses, and toughen the regulation on who can own them.

Back inside Chester's Exacta Stadium, the last 20 minutes was a bit of a thriller: the home team holding on to a 2-1 lead, though FC United constantly threatened to come back – all of which underlines the fact that in the absence of Sky TV cameras, those fabled prawn sandwiches and big money, the game's essential thrills might actually be easier to experience. The 3,219 fans who turned up created a fantastically infectious atmosphere.

Incidentally, this coming Saturday will see no Premier League or Championship fixtures, because of international matches – and has been craftily rebranded by grassroots football activists as "non-league day". The online blurb exhorts "all football fans to watch their local non-league side play, providing both a boost to grassroots football and a new experience for fans used to the upper echelons of the game".

If you're troubled by the idea that big-time football has now become a cash–dominated farce, you should think about trying it. And if you need further encouragement, consider these words, posted on Cif by a disciple of Weymouth FC, currently doing their thing in the Evo-Stik southern premier division. "There are no poncy egos here. That nippy right-winger you idolise from the terraces? You'll see him the next day emptying your bin."

Do you have a story of life in Britain's flatlining economy?

Continuing our series Anywhere but Westminster, we're looking to visit areas and businesses that illustrate the economic state of the UK

A boarded-up high street. Photographer: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

Anywhere but Westminster is a series of films and articles aimed at exploring the gap between mainstream politics and real life. Having just spent three weeks film-making and going quietly mad at the party conferences, we've been reminded again of why we conceived the series in the first place. In fact, the films that were made outside the conference bubbles in Birmingham, Wirral and the town of Ramsbottom were ABW pieces in all but name.

In early November we will return with the regular series, making two more films before Christmas. It seems to us that everyone we speak to right now wants to talk about their experience of the state of the economy, and a crisis that shows no signs of coming to an end – and with that in mind, we're asking Comment is free users for suggestions as to non-Westminster stories that highlight Britain's economic plight. Do you know of a place that is the downturn incarnate? Is there a particular business whose fate speaks volumes about the state we're in? Does your own experience point to an aspect of the flatlining economy that politicians don't talk about? Please keep the ideas as specific as possible – for the ABW films we always visit a single location to explore an issue or story. John Domokos and I will be back in the thread at regular intervals.

Occupy Bristol: 'This is Camp Hope' - video

The UK's biggest tent protest outside London has attracted a mixture of those at the sharp end of economic inequality and those with one foot in the city's mainstream. John Harris visits Occupy Bristol to find out whether protesters are winning over a public who are increasingly feeling the pinch

The West Midlands Euro road trip – video

The UK's relationship with Europe has always had its ups and downs, but recently it's been a real rollercoaster. John Harris and John Domokos travel to Birmingham, Walsall, Coventry and Halesowen to find out what the Midlands makes of David Cameron's tough posture on the EU. Should Britain be in or out of Europe? What does that mean, anyway?

The desperate search for jobs in Warrington

Shifting blame on to the jobless under the guise of positive thinking is not only demeaning but sinister

The Work Programme and the search for 'hidden jobs' - video Link to this video

Among a pile of papers and leaflets in the Warrington branch of Cheshire Training Associates there are two American self-help books. The New Dynamics of Winning and Seeds of Greatness are both by Denis Waitley, a graduate of the US navy academy at Annapolis and mentor to astronauts and American football stars. The former brazenly offers the chance to "gain the mindset of a champion"; the blurb on the back of the latter promises "secrets" that will help any reader to "become a happier, healthier and more successful person".

Waitley-ism, perhaps, sits awkwardly with the town outside, in which youth unemployment increased by 230% in 2011 and gaining the mindset of a champion must be challenging, at least.

But his credo fits perfectly into what happens in these offices: the day-to-day operation of the government's work programme. In Warrington the standard payment-by-results contract was given to the security firm G4S, who outsourced the work to Cheshire Training Associates. The impression is of bright, sparky people – "employment consultants", they call them – seeing to a machine that runs on one article of faith: that unemployment should be understood not in the context of a dead job market but the knowledge, motivation, expectations and behaviour of the individual.

At the end of last week an indication of the essential idea came from the Conservative work and pensions minister, Maria Miller, when she appeared on Radio 5 Live. "There isn't a shortage of jobs – what there can be is a lack of an appetite for some of the jobs that are available," she said. "I don't think it's a lack of jobs at the moment … I think it really is making sure that we've got people knowing where those jobs are."

You're generally eligible for referral to the work programme if you've been out of work for a year, though for those aged 18-24, nine months is sufficient.

When we asked for firsthand testimony about what it involves from readers of Comment is free, we received about 300 online posts and emails: accounts of dead-end unpaid "work placements"; stories from people in their late 50s who couldn't see any way back into work; suggestions that, in the face of rising unemployment, some of the work programme's providers are barely bothering their clients.

One of the most incisive responses came from someone freshly inducted into the care of DWP contractor and multinational group Maximus. "The exploratory talk centered around our perceived failure to achieve employment," they wrote. "The woman asked each of us for potential 'barriers to employment', which seemed to be a general trawl through people's private lives … the national employment crisis was not suitable for discussion, apparently."

Thirty years ago Norman Tebbit told the story of his father's bike, and attracted not just controversy but infamy; now, much the same thinking is tightly built into how the state treats the unemployed. This is unsettling: you could easily think of it as being close to a moral outrage. There again, before lefty ire got the better of you, you might just as easily wonder whether, if the only option available to the unemployed is to stoically look for work, why not equip them with the skills and mindset such a grind requires, and encourage the habit of positive thinking?

The problem is that the infusion of the work programme's gospel into individual minds can seem not just sinister but demeaning. In Warrington the DWP's press person introduces me to 27-year-old Richard Dunn, who has spent time on the programme and now has a job, of sorts: as a driver's mate for furniture chain SCS on a six-month contract. He was unemployed for nine months. At the peak of his search for work, he says he was averaging 25 to 30 applications a week, most of which did not even get a reply. So, I wonder, in the end, does he think that the fact he was unemployed was his fault?

"Yeah," he says. "I do. I think I should have applied for more. I should have picked myself up in the morning, got out, come to a place like this – tried more. When you're feeling down you start blaming the world for your mistakes … You feel the world owes you. And it doesn't. You owe the world: you have to motivate yourself, and get out there, and try. And that's what this place helped with." I mention the 2.6 million people officially out of work, and suggest that his time on the dole was possibly not because of any failings on his part. "But half the people don't want to work," he says.

Which brings us to an immovable aspect of the national understanding of unemployment. Do not think that the recasting of joblessness as a matter of individual failings, or the shift to conditional benefits, are anywhere near as controversial as some – myself included – would like. Look at the latest British Social Attitudes survey: when presented with the suggestion that "unemployment benefits are too high and they discourage the unemployed from finding jobs", 54% agreed, up from 35% in 1983.

Sped on its way by pop psychology, the free market conception of joblessness has oozed into the national consciousness; as more encounters in Warrington prove, it even defines the thoughts of some of the unemployed themselves. On this evidence there is not just no such thing as society – by implication there must be no such thing as the economy, either.

When the Daily Mail calls rightwingers stupid, the result is dumbogeddon

Charlie Brooker

Look what you're missing: Kelly Brook in typical Mail Online mode. Photograph: Dave M. Benett/Getty

There was a minor kerfuffle a few weeks ago when the Daily Mail website overtook the New York Times to become the most popular news site in the world. Liberals can whine all they like, but that's a formidable achievement, especially considering it's not really a conventional news site at all, more a big online bin full of pictures of reality stars, with the occasional Stephen Glover column lobbed in to lighten the mood.

The print edition of the paper is edited by Paul Dacre, who is regularly praised by media types for knowing what his customers want, and then selling it to them. This is an extraordinary skill that puts him on the same rarefied level as, say, anyone who works in a shoe shop. Or a bike shop. Or any kind of shop. Or in any absolutely any kind of business whatsoever. Whatever you think about Dacre's politics, you can't deny he's got a job to do, and he does it. Like a peg. Or a ladle. Or even a knee. Dacre is perhaps Britain's foremost knee.

Curiously, the online version of the Mail has become a hit by doing the reverse of what Dacre is commended for doing. It succeeds by remorselessly delivering industrial quantities of precisely the opposite of what a traditional Mail reader would presumably want to read: frothy stories about carefree young women enjoying themselves. Kim Kardashian or Kelly Brook "pour their curves" into a selection of tight dresses and waddle before the lens and absolutely nobody on the planet gives a toss apart from Mail Online, which is doomed to host the images, and Mail Online's readers, who flock in their thousands to leave messages claiming to be not in the slightest bit interested in the story they're reading and commenting on.

Now Mail Online has gone one step further by running a story that not only insults its own readers, but cruelly invites them to underline the insult by making fools of themselves. In what has to be a deliberate act of "trolling", last Friday it carried a story headlined "Rightwingers are less intelligent than left wingers, says study". In terms of enraging your core readership, this is the equivalent of Nuts magazine suddenly claiming only gay men masturbate to Hollyoaks babes.

The Mail's report went on to detail the results of a study carried out by a group of Canadian academics, which appears to show some correlation between low childhood intelligence and rightwing politics. It also claimed that stupid people hold rightwing views in order to feel "safe". Other items they hold in order to feel safe include clubs, rocks and dustbin lids. But those are easy to let go of. Political beliefs get stuck to your hands. And the only way to remove them is to hold your brain under the hot tap and scrub vigorously for several decades.

As you might expect, many Mail Online readers didn't take kindly to a report that strived to paint them as simplistic, terrified dimwits. Many leapt from the tyres they were swinging in to furrow their brows and howl in anger. Others, tragically, began tapping rudimentary responses into the comments box. Which is where the tragi-fun really began.

"Stupidest study of them all," raged a reader called Beth. "So were the testers conservative for being so thick or were they left and using a non study to make themselves look better?" Hmmm. There's no easy answer to that. Because it doesn't make sense.

"I seem to remember 'academics' once upon a time stating that the world was flat and the Sun orbitted the Earth," scoffed Ted, who has presumably been keeping his personal brand of scepticism alive since the middle ages.

"Sounds like a BBC study, type of thing they would waste the Licence fee on, load of Cods wallop," claimed Terry from Leicester, thereby managing to ignore the findings while simultaneously attacking public service broadcasting for something it hadn't done. For his next trick, Terry will learn to whistle and shit at the same time.

Not all the respondents were stupid. Some were merely deluded. Someone calling themselves "Hillside" from Sydney claimed: "I have an IQ over 200, have six degrees and diplomas and am 'right-wing', as are others I know at this higher level of intelligence." His IQ score is particularly impressive considering the maximum possible score on Mensa's preferred IQ test is 161.

Whatever the numbers: intellectual dick-measuring isn't to everyone's tastes anyway. Simply by highlighting his own intelligence "Hillside" alienated several of his commentbox brethren.

"If there is one person I can not stand and that is a snob who thinks they are intelligent because if they were intelligent and educated they wouldn't be snobs," argued Liz from London. Once you've clambered over the broken grammar, deliberately placed at the start of the sentence like a rudimentary barricade of piled-up chairs, there's a tragic conundrum at work here. She claims intellectual snootiness is ugly, which it is, but unfortunately she says it in such a stupid way it's impossible for anyone smarter than a steak-and-ale pie not to look down on her. Thus, for Liz, the crushing cycle of snobbery continues.

On and on the comments went, turning a rather stark write-up of a daft-sounding study into a sublime piece of live online performance art. A chimps' tea party of the damned. The Mail has long been a master at trolling lefties; now it's mischievously turned on its own readers, and the results could only be funnier if the website came with free plastic lawn furniture for them to lob at the screen. You couldn't make it up.

Now the American right has even hijacked breast cancer's pink ribbon

The most seemingly apolitical things are now deepy political. Having helmet-like hair: rightwing. Eating vegetables: leftwing

Hadley Freeman

Karen Handel has resigned from Komen following the row over withdrawing funding to Planned Parenthood. Photograph: John Bazemore/AP

Winter evenings getting you down? Fear not! Here is an exciting parlour game to help you while away the dark hours. It is called Right or Left? and is, impressively, nearly as simpleminded as Red or Black?, Simon Cowell's recent contribution to Britain's self-lobotomisation, but with more potential to discuss cancer, abortion and other things Ant and Dec tend to stay mum on. Fun for all the family!

Right or Left? determines whether anything, even an illness, is right or left in its political leanings. Yes, illnesses. You may not have heard of Susan G Komen for the Cure, or Komen, the behemoth breast cancer research foundation in America, but you have undoubtedly seen its most famous trapping, the pink ribbon, which the foundation arguably invented back in 1991. Since its inception in 1982, Komen has invested more than $2bn for breast cancer research and prevention, which made its recent behaviour a tad surprising.

Last week, Komen announced that it was withdrawing its $600,000 annual funding from Planned Parenthood, an organisation it has long supported, and which helps to provide breast cancer screening, prevention and awareness to lower income women in America, owing, Komen claimed, to purely "regulatory" reasons. On Sunday, the Huffington Post got access to emails suggesting that this decision was, as most suspected, political and motivated by Karen Handel, Komen's recently appointed and avowedly anti-abortion vice-president for public policy.

Planned Parenthood has been under attack repeatedly from the right because of its abortion and contraceptive services, even though abortion counts for only 3% of its work. None of the grants from Komen went to abortion services – they went into cancer detection, precisely what the foundation claims to support.

Aside from Handel, Komen's CEO Nancy Brinkler served as an ambassador under George W Bush and donates heavily to Republican candidates. And speaking of Bush, the former president's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, has since been exposed for his involvement in Komen's strategy on Planned Parenthood. Komen's hiring of Handel, feminist website Jezebel wrote, "was a continuation of the gradual reddening of the foundation".

After a massive public and political outcry, Komen reversed its decision to strip Planned Parenthood of funding, although not everyone was happy with this slight de-reddening – pinking, one could say – of Komen's policy. Today Handel resigned from the foundation, while Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has claimed that Komen should not provide any support to Planned Parenthood because of the "ties to cancer and abortions". Never mind that there is a more likely correlation between sweater vests and stupidity than abortions and breast cancer, have I mentioned already that abortions account for just 3% of Planned Parenthood's work?

But that, of course, is not the point. As Gail Collins wrote in the New York Times, "we have now hit the point where there's nothing that can't be divided into red-state, blue-state."

Yes, it's like a Dr Seuss book gone very weird, in which even the most seemingly apolitical things are now deeply political, with breast cancer charities being co-opted by the right and used to promote their anti-women agendas.

Perhaps this was inevitable as the Republican party became less about economic conservatism and more about social conservatism, and a politician's lifestyle became at least as significant as his political credibility. Claiming one is middle class when one is phenomenally wealthy is increasingly a Republican thing; living in a big city or, worse, on one of the coasts that is not part of a mythical land called Real America is very much a Democrat thing.

(Incidentally, narking off musicians is very much a rightwing thing, as we were reminded last week when both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich were called out for using songs without the musicians' permission, something that happens to a lot of to rightwing politicians in America. Heart, for example, complained after Sarah Palin used one of their songs; sadly, 'twas not their great sperm-stealing hitchhiking classic, All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You.)

Not that Democrats have shied away from similarly freighting down the most unlikely things with political significance. Being a good pet owner, it turns out, is a Democrat cause. Two weeks ago the communications director for Obama's re-election campaign, David Axelrod, tweeted a photo of the president and First Dog in a car together with the message, "How loving owners transport their dogs" – a dig at Romney who infamously once drove to Canada with his dog strapped to the roof of his car.

Having helmet-like hair: rightwing. Eating vegetables: leftwing. Religion: rightwing. Science: leftwing. But really, the possibilities here are endless! Flowers: rightwing (so decorative, so expensive); trees: leftwing (so climate change-y, so environmental). Dresses: rightwing (so ladylike); trousers (on women): leftwing (so Hillary Clinton-y).

So like I said, fun for all the family! Unless anyone in your family has discovered that not only do they have a life-threatening illness, but that their illness has been co-opted by a political party who are using it to promote their own agenda. Then it's probably a lot less fun.

Mitt Romney's Santorum setback is a big win for Barack Obama

Rick Santorum's caucus and primary wins have brutally exposed Romney's weakness as the GOP's unloved nominee apparent

Michael Cohen

Rick Santorum speaking at a rally in Blaine, Minnesota. Photograph: Eric Miller/Reuters

There's a regular joke that has been employed after pretty much every single Republican debate and practically every Republican primary and caucus this election cycle: tonight's big winner was … Barack Obama.

It is perhaps the most cutting and yet appropriate critique of the GOP nomination fight. The more America sees of the prospective Republican candidates and the longer this race goes on, the more four years of Barack Obama doesn't seem like such a bad thing.

Rarely has Obama's advantage been more obvious than after the past few days – and, in particular, after Tuesday night's stunning and wholly unexpected defeat for presumptive GOP frontrunner, Mitt Romney. Romney didn't just lose to Rick Santorum – he got destroyed. In Missouri, he trailed Santorum by 30 points; in Minnesota, he finished third, behind Ron Paul, with a paltry 16% of the vote (in a state he won handily in 2008); in Colorado, another state he won in 200, with 60% of the vote, Romney took just 34% to Santorum's 40.2%.

Now, granted Romney didn't put up much of a fight in either Minnesota or Missouri – and the Missouri vote was purely a beauty contest with no actual delegates at stake. But in Colorado, he devoted significant time and resources and led in pre-election polls, but still lost. This was as bad a night as a frontrunner has had in a primary race, maybe ever.

Just one week ago, after Romney's convincing win in the Nevada caucus, the former Massachusetts governor appeared to have the political wind at his back. But in just a matter of days, his brief momentum has been completely upended and the creeping doubts about his candidacy, which he appeared to have silenced, have loudly returned.

It's not just the election results that show how quickly the tide has turned.

First, there was Friday's jobs report, which indicated that unemployment in the US has dropped to 8.3% and that the US economy may slowly but surely finding its way out of the hole it's been buried in for the past two years. This is almost certainly a more important story than the returns in Minnesota and Missouri. The entire rationale – indeed, one might say only rationale – for Romney's campaign against Obama is that he will be a better steward of the US economy. But if the economy continues tentatively to improve between now and November, neither Romney nor any other Republican will have a very compelling message to take to the electorate this fall.

Next came a Washington Post/ABC poll that showed Romney was trailing President Obama by six points in a general election match-up, and that by a two-to-one margin, the more voters learned about Romney, the less they liked him. This comes on the heels of earlier polling that indicates Romney has unfavorabilities above 50%. That isn't dangerous territory for a presidential candidate, it's fatal ground.

It's often the case that candidates are strengthened by long primary battles – certainly, that was the case for Barack Obama in 2008. But the opposite effect is happening with Romney. Facing off against a band of second-tier rivals that includes a former senator who lost his last Senate election by 18 points, a former speaker of the House who was last relevant in national politics when email was an emerging technology, and a congressman who wants to return America to the gold standard, Romney has won only three states. In fact, Santorum has now won more primary and caucus races than Romney. Anyone who told you that was going to happen five weeks ago would have been laughed out of the room.

But as the Republican party has moved further and further to the right, Romney's less-than-stellar conservative bona fides has been his Achilles' heel. While he leads his rivals in the all-important delegate count, it's fairly obvious that he has yet to capture the hearts of the GOP rank and file. Indeed, the entire tale of the Republican nomination race can be seen as an unceasing effort on the part of GOP voters to find someone, anyone, to cast their ballot for who isn't Mitt Romney.

When all is said and done, Romney is still likely to be the Republican nominee. He has the most money, the most establishment support, the strongest ground game and is probably the best-equipped of all the candidates for a long slog toward the nomination. But if the last few days have shown us anything, it is that Romney is a seriously flawed candidate who has rather dramatically failed to seal the deal with conservative GOP voters.

And every day longer this race goes on, the more damage will be done to Romney's hope of winning the White House. In short, last night was yet another great night for Barack Obama.