A nudge and a wink... what the Left are really saying about Liam Fox

Hypocrisy isn’t what it used to be. Once, Christian preachers would thunder about the virtues of marriage and then be discovered canoodling with women who weren’t their wives. Everyone would laugh.

Now, pious politically correct persons seek, by innuendo and hint, nudge and wink, to damage a Cabinet Minister by suggesting that he is a secret homosexual. And nobody laughs at the slimy dishonesty of it all.

Everyone pretends to be very concerned about the ‘Ministerial Code’, and about various boring meetings in hotels which may or may not have been attended by some youth.

They even discover, with feigned horror, that the Ministry of Defence is sometimes approached by people who want to make money by selling weapons. Gosh.

But none of this serious, detailed stuff is the real point of what’s really being said. Everyone knows it. Nobody admits it.

Here’s what is really happening. The modish Left know deep down that the  public don’t agree with them about homosexuality. In private, they themselves may not even believe the noble public statements they so often make.

And so, without ever openly admitting what they are up to, they destroyed a Minister they disliked for allegedly doing something they officially approve of.

I am no friend of Liam Fox. I know nothing about his private life and care less. But I think it is a very dirty business that Left-wing newspapers, which claim to believe that homosexuality is no different from heterosexuality, behave in this way.

It’s particularly striking that this came almost immediately after the Prime Minister deliberately teased what is left of the Tory Party by saying he favoured homosexual marriage.

I suspect that Mr Cameron was trying to goad the enfeebled Right wing of his party. If they had reacted, he would have crushed them to show who’s boss.

The Left – and Mr Cameron is of the Left – have done this for many years. Moral conservatives have foolishly lumbered into the trap by objecting. And so they have allowed themselves to be smeared as the cruel persecutors of a gentle minority.

But the events of the past week show clearly that the Left, for all their noisy sanctity on the subject, are far from free of prejudice against homosexuals, and quite ready to use such bigotry when it suits them to do so.

Protecting the wrong flock

How typical of the furry Archbishop of Canterbury that he can stand up against the persecution of Christianity in Africa, but isn’t aware of it here.

We shall see in time if he did any good by sharing tea and scones with the sinister Robert Mugabe.I doubt it.

But his behaviour is typical of a church which has been so obsessed with the Third World for so long that it has forgotten the country of its birth, where legions of bureaucrats – often aided by soppy vicars – are quietly strangling the Christian faith.

My guess is that there will be a thriving Anglican church in Africa several centuries after Canterbury Cathedral  has been converted into a mosque, and  St Paul’s into a museum.

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A worrying film of a worrying book, We Need To Talk About Kevin, is about to open in this country.

It concerns the culprit of a school massacre, and – though the fictional killer is on SSRI ‘antidepressant’ medication, as almost all such killers are – neither book nor film grasps the significance of this. They minimise it. What a pity.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the alleged culprit of the latest rampage killing, Scott Dekraai of Seal Beach, California, is said to have been suffering from ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’, which in the USA is often ‘treated’ with SSRI pills. He is also said by his ex-wife to be ‘a diagnosed bipolar individual who has problems with his own medication and his reaction to same’.

Eight more people are dead, quite possibly at the hands of someone who had been taking ‘antidepressants’. Isn’t it time the authorities looked into this connection?

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Rock superstars such as ‘Sir’ Paul McCartney are the new aristocracy.

Normal human beings bow and simper in their presence, their path is cleared through life, and their dull, unoriginal thoughts are treated with respect.

They also exude a tremendous smugness, these vegetarian, animal-loving, charity-supporting types who cram their unfortunate children into state schools to prove that a billion pounds hasn’t turned them into conservatives.

But when it comes to basic neighbourly behaviour, they are as yobbish as the over-rated music that made them rich and famous. Council officials had to be called to the McCartney wedding party in London in the small hours of last Monday to get him to turn down the racket.

If he’s so nice, why didn’t it cross his mind that others have jobs to go to and might need to sleep?
 

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In a prison in ‘liberated’ Libya, Amnesty International inspectors report having seen instruments of torture and having heard ‘whipping and screams’ from a cell.

There is also clear evidence of racial bigotry in the savage treatment of non-Arab Africans. So, if we intervened there to ‘protect civilians’, why aren’t we intervening now?

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Street demonstrations are usually a waste of time at best. But they can also be dangerous or harmful. And I must appeal to any readers I have in Boston in Lincolnshire to stay away from a march against immigration planned to take place there next month. I also appeal to the organisers of the march to call it off. And I’m hoping for sleet, and a strong east wind off the Wash, on that day. Let me explain.

Some weeks ago I described the damage that stupid Government policies have done to Boston, which now has a huge migrant population mainly from Eastern Europe.

I did not blame the migrants, whose enterprise I admire, or those who employed them. I hoped to illustrate the wrongness of our open borders, and of the EU membership that forces us to keep them open. I also wanted to assail the terrible schools, the dim welfare policies and the family breakdown that have left so many British-born young people unemployable.

Some concrete-headed councillor in Boston chose to attack what I had written, and cast doubt on its truth, reasonably angering many Bostonians who knew that what I had said was correct.

But a demonstration in such a place can do no good, and may well cause tension and bring undesirable political chancers to the town. Already, an outfit called ‘Unite Against Fascism’ (what ‘fascism’, by the way?) is planning a counter- demonstration on the same day. Just imagine the stupidities that could lead to.

If there is trouble, it will only damage the cause of those who want common sense to prevail in this country again.  Call it off.

Our nice, furry Archbishop... lost in a barbarous world

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column 

Do we have to wait until the hate-filled mobs storm into Canterbury Cathedral and drag him from the pulpit before the Archbishop of Canterbury grasps that Christianity is in danger in this country? Nice, furry, mild and useless, Dr Rowan Williams chose this Easter week not to protect his Church, but to rebuke several bishops who had rightly warned of the swelling rage against the Church.

No doubt he is right to point out that Christians elsewhere suffer more. I would like to hear more protests from 'human rights' campaigners against the nasty treatment of Christians in the Muslim world, not least under the rule of the Palestinian Authority which many leftist Christians idiotically admire.

But so what? In those rough neighbourhoods, under the grudging scowl of Muslim so-called 'tolerance', this has been the case for centuries. Here, things are and ought to be different. Dr Williams is the head of the Established Church in England. The laws of this country, the shape of its cities and countryside, its language, morals, literature, architecture, family structure and politics are all based upon Christianity.

Take it away and it will be like removing the mortar from a great building, leaving its bricks and stones loose and trembling in the storm to come. And yet there are many people who want to do this. In this Century of Selfishness, Christianity is an annoying obstacle, with its infuriating insistence on active unselfishness and its unalterable rules which say that there are some things you just cannot do, like for instance murder unborn babies and walk out on your marriage.

Last week, there was yet another case of someone being in trouble for being a Christian, in an officially Christian country. I collect these incidents: preachers arrested and fined; nurses disciplined for offering to pray for patients; registrars disciplined for declining to officiate at homosexual civil partnerships; adoption societies forced to close because they will not place children with same-sex couples. Just 30 years ago, they would have been unthinkable. Another few decades and Christianity will be against the law.

I expect that before long there will be cases of teachers being fired for resisting compulsory sex education in primary schools. Last week's example was that of a nurse, Shirley Chaplin, badgered by superiors for wearing a crucifix on a chain.

Does anyone really believe that she would have been pestered by authority if she had worn a Muslim symbol on a chain round her neck? Does anyone believe that a Muslim preacher would have been put in the cells, and fined £1,000 - as happened to Shawn Holes in Glasgow - for callinghomosexuality a sin in a public place? Each of these cases lets others know that they had better be careful, and makes many faithful Christians fear that they may have to choose between their faith and their livelihood.

Does Dr Williams even know about the oppressive new codes of practice in the professions and the public sector, which compel employees to adopt the new secular faith of 'Equality and Diversity'? Now the Archbishop has strangely chosen this weekend to attack his fellow Christians in the Roman Catholic church. They must be beginning to wonder how long they have got before they are arrested. Yet nobody seems to ask, in all the justified fury against Roman Catholic priests who have disgraced themselves and wounded others, an interesting question. Here it is. This Easter weekend, a film was released into British cinemas called 'Kick-Ass', which features an 11-year-old girl, Chloe Moretz, who speaks in filthy language and wears outfits obviously designed to sexualise her.

I find this repellent, disgusting and immoral. Yet this film, which members of Britain's exciting post-Christian elite helped to make, is receiving generous praise in the liberal media. Why? If this isn't the corruption of the young, then what is? Yet I have no doubt that those who defend this sewage are in the ranks of those howling at the Pope for supposedly condoning priestly child abuse (which he doesn't).

Phooey. What they hate is not the abuse, which happens in liberal state institutions just as it does in the Roman church. What they hate is the Christian church. And at the moment they are winning the argument partly because the Church won't fight back with any spirit. Dr Williams seems actually to be on the side of the anti-God battalions.

Cam Jong II, a not-so-very-dear leader

David Cameron's strange appearance in 'casual' gear made him look as if he had been dressed by a committee, perhaps of his enemies, perhaps of people who are not very bright.

What were they hoping for? That these clothes would further infuriate the remaining conservatives daft enough to support this liberal in biker's clothing? That he would get the votes of ageing women who still hanker after the young Marlon Brando?

As it happens, he ended up looking faintly like North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, who also seems to have consulted the wrong style advisers in a bid to appear to be something other than he is.

Given that one of Mr Cameron's key media supporters this week issued a stern condemnation of conservative journalists such as me for failing to show 'discipline' by continuing to criticise Mr Cameron, I think I may start calling him Cam Jong Il, the notvery-dear leader of the Democratic People's Blue Labour Party.

Discipline, indeed. Who do these people think they are?

Time to put the clock back, not further forward

I've never seen the point of British Summer Time as it is. It's like jetlag without the travel. But what if the clocks never went back, but went forward even further? Bar-haunting trendies living in London may not see anything wrong with pushing time as far forward as they can. The disadvantages are only clear to early risers, who dislike being forced to go to work in the dark for half the year.

I also rather like the lamplit dusks of late autumn, a very English time of day designed for tea and hot buttered toast, which would vanish if we had our clocks permanently on Berlin time, as these zealots want.

I read last week that this plan now has the support of all the major political parties, plus a lot of metropolitan journalists who plainly seldom come out from under the duvet before 11am. Once again, it's time to put the clock back.

• The police have sabotaged the attempt to ban mephedrone, before it has even begun. A spokesmoron for the Association of Chief Police Officers has announced that the police will not actually be enforcing the law, by arresting and charging people for possessing this stupid poison. Oh no, that would be 'criminalising' them. It will be only the 'evil dealers' who are targeted

What this uniformed cretin should realise is that young people criminalise themselves by buying an illegal drug. It is completely illogical to say that something is so dangerous that you should go to jail for selling it, yet when you buy it, nothing should happen to you.

Drug-takers are criminals, not victims, and if we took this view there would be many fewer of them.

A fitting symbol for a nation dominated byphonies

Only a nation on the way down, whose culture was dominated by phonies and jokers, could allow the building of the stupid and ugly tower planned to adorn London's Olympic Park.

I suppose that, since it looks like part of a collapsed steelworks, it might symbolise our lost industrial greatness. Compare this, and the vast, tatty zero of the London Eye (which ruins many fine prospects of Central London) with the things we used to build  -  St Paul's Cathedral, now hemmed in by brutalist concrete, Big Ben, a soaring stone hymn to Victorian selfconfidence, and even the lost twin towers of Wembley.

Now all we propose is a futile tangle of metal that will look as if it has fallen down when it is up.

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Your fawning offends Islam Archbishop... not your Christianity

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

When did we go soft? When did we develop our national tendency to cringe before we are even hit, to apologise for existing?

What's most striking about the past 50 years of our history is how we have given in without a fight to those who want to revolutionise our society.

It is all very well going on about Winston Churchill, but Archbishop Rowan Williams is a figure much more representative of modern Britain.

This prelate whimpered last week that Christianity was 'offensive' to Muslims.

Offensive? I know we have been urged to stop being horrid to this inept, terrifyingly well meaning man - and it really is nothing personal - but he does rather ask for it.

A few months ago he mused on the possibilities of allowing a little light Sharia Law in this country.This is, I suppose, a point of view. I just can't work out why the leader of a Christian church should hold it.

The same goes for the Lord Chief Injustice, Lord Phillips, whose entire career and substantial salary are based on centuries of Christian-based law.

If it is anyone's job to suggest Muslim law should get a toehold in Britain, it isn't his.

In my experience, Muslims aren't in the least bit 'offended' by Christianity.

I've argued with them about it, in places as different as Peshawar, on the North-West Frontier, and Whitechapel, in the East End of London. And I had the impression they were relieved to find someone from the West who didn't fawn all over them.

What really offends them is what also offends many of us - crudity, drunkenness, pornography and licence.

In any case, given that Christianity was founded centuries before Islam, Muslims can't really claim to be upset by it, any more than I can be 'offended' by the existence of Stonehenge or a Hindu temple.

What should worry Dr Williams much more is the printing of millions of doctored versions of the Koran in Saudi Arabia, deliberately edited to encourage angry militancy.

I am grateful to Channel 4 and Antony Thomas for revealing this astonishing fact in their programme on the Koran last week.

What, you might ask, are tanks and missiles doing in a book 13 centuries old?

Well, in the Saudi edition, English translation, Surah 8, verse 60, a passage on unbelievers reads: 'Make ready against them all you can of power, including steeds of war (tanks, planes, missiles, artillery) to threaten the enemy of Allah.'

And in a verse that speaks of those who have earned God's anger and gone astray, someone has inserted - in brackets - 'such as the Jews' and 'such as the Christians'.

The programme also pointed out that in Surah 5, verse 69, the Koran assures righteous Jews and Christians that 'no fear should come upon them'.

A footnote in the Saudi version insists that this was cancelled by a later verse which claims that those of any religion other than Islam will never be accepted.

This might be something to get offended about, if you wanted to, Dr Williams.

No escaping the town hall Thought Police

Sorry about this, but right-thinking people are rejoicing too soon over the case of Lillian Ladele - the registrar given a hard time at a Left-wing town hall for refusing to officiate at homosexual civil partnerships.

The lowly employment tribunal that backed her can be overruled by the Employment Appeal Tribunal - and the case could even end up in the High Court.

Islington Council, which was found to have discriminated against Miss Ladele, is appealing. And the homosexual lobby is determined to win.I wouldn't be at all surprised if some higher court imposes a politically correct verdict. Liberal lawyers are already in a froth, calling the tribunal decision 'extreme'.

Why does it matter so much? As far as I can discover, Miss Ladele's principles didn't cause severe inconvenience to her colleagues.

Last year even PC Islington had many more marriages (799) than civil partnerships (230) - and the number of civil partnerships is dropping fast anyway after the first burst of enthusiasm.

With 13 full-time registrars and eight more part-timers, you would have thought that, with a bit of give-and-take, nobody need be overworked because of Miss Ladele's principles.

What happened was that some of her colleagues, homosexuals themselves, decided to make an issue out of her beliefs, falsely calling her a bigot and also using that meaningless boo-word 'homophobe'.

These town hall Stalins made her life a misery, because they didn't like her opinions.There's not a scrap of evidence that Miss Ladele has ever insulted or otherwise mistreated any homosexual. The homosexual lobby want to be free to discriminate hard and strong against those who disagree with their opinions.

Offered tolerance, they pretended to want equality. Actually they hope to stamp out traditional morality altogether. They are the Thought Police - and they are frighteningly close to victory.

Mr Glum, and a criminal error

Every so often I come across a glum-faced cove called Dominic Grieve, who is trying to fill the hole left when David Davis, the former Shadow Home Secretary, was lost in a tragic accident somewhere off Hull.

Mr Grieve likes to rumble on about the police having to cope with too many forms, blaming this on the past 11 years of Labour government.

His maths isn't very good.

I am told that much of the worst bureaucracy stems from the Police And Criminal Evidence Act, 1984, and its codes of practice, and from the Criminal Procedure And Investigations Act 1996.

Who was in office then?

• Don't be fooled by New Labour's attempt to pretend that it died in a tragic accident when Anthony Blair's canoe was spitefully sunk by Gordon Brown.The whole thing was a fix designed to diddle the country out of billions of pounds after the next Election. Blair did not die, but swam home and went off to hide in the Conservative Party under the name David Cameron. The disguise is so thin, you'd think anyone could see through it.

• What joy to learn that the anti-God movie epic The Golden Compass, based on Philip Pullman's atheist children's fables, flopped so badly that a sequel is unlikely. Despite using bankable stars - Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig - the makers couldn't turn Pullman's prose into another Lord Of The Rings, even after gutting it of much of the propaganda.

• Science now accepts that women's brains are different from men's brains, another revelation from the University of the Blindingly Obvious.Soon these geniuses will also spot that women's bodies are different from men's.

These facts are recognised already by marketing men, hospitals, insurance companies, clothes shops, shoe shops, sensible schools, architects, and anybody else capable of thought. Only the law insists that there is no difference between the sexes. Ever wondered why?

Is the Church of England finished? Should it be?

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

I love the Church of England. By that I do not mean its bishops, its arid modern prayers and poetry-free, unmemorable modern bibles, nor its stripped and carpeted modernised churches, its compulsory handshakes, perky modern hymns or happy-clappy conventicles where everyone is saved. If I'm saved it was such a narrow squeak that I think it wiser not to go on about it, as the man said.

What I love is the wondrous Elizabethan settlement which refused to make windows into men's souls and allowed Catholics and Protestants to forget their differences in a rather beautiful ambiguity.

That settlement is expressed in several ways. It lingers in buildings, in books, in music, a sort of ghostly presence just within reach at certain times of day and in a few unravaged, unwrecked parts of this country. It also continues to survive as a body of thought, song and literature, quite immune from the peculiar bureaucratic organisation which currently uses the Church's name.

It is still often to be found in churches and cathedrals which - though sadly stripped of much loveliness - managed to retain and guard far more of their pre-Reformation mystery and art than in any other Protestant country.

It is to be found in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, itself quarried from Coverdale's Bible and from the later Authorised Version, written in the Golden Age of the English language by people who understood poetry, cadence, music and memory - and who were concerned to keep what they could of a much older heritage.

I don't expect to carry Roman Catholics with me here, as they have long ago constructed a myth about the Church of England which is, like all good myths, rooted in truth but yet not entirely true. The torture and judicial murder of Roman Catholic martyrs such as Edmund Campion remain as a gory stain on Elizabeth and on the Anglican tradition. But Campion (as Evelyn Waugh's fine biography makes clear) sought his martyrdom and refused all opportunities to evade it.

Thomas More and John Fisher were martyred by Henry VIII, not really over doctrine but over the King's desire to have his first marriage annulled, something which might easily have been done by the Roman Catholic Church under slightly different political circumstances. More and Fisher, now recognised as men of courage and integrity, perjured and judicially murdered, appear on the most recent Anglican Calendar of Saints. 

And that is in spite of the fact that More himself was no mean persecutor of Protestants, sending several followers of Luther to die in the flames (for Henry VIII killed anyone who got in his way, Catholic or Protestant). He was not, perhaps, the near-perfect man portrayed in that matchless film 'A Man for All Seasons', but his courage - like that of his opponents - is amazing to us.

I may be wrong, but I do not think that Thomas Cranmer is to be found on any such Roman Catholic calendar. Like many Anglicans, I've attended Roman Catholic churches and cathedrals for Mass (in which I don't take Communion because I think that I'm not entitled to do so, my beliefs being insufficiently clear on the subject, and also because I suspect that by doing so I might upset Roman Catholics) and for Vespers. But I have seldom found a Roman Catholic who knew much about Anglicanism or its services.

I also tend to think that the Roman Catholic concentration upon the English Martyrs ( the murals in the Brompton Oratory and St Aloysius in Oxford are particularly striking examples of this) are a bit of a propagandist 'you did it too' response to the rather larger persecution of Protestants by Mary.

And most of those who feature in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, the roll call of Mary's Protestant victims,  were obscure and powerless people, not garlanded academics like Campion or great men like More and Fisher,  but even so caught up in a great battle and compelled by circumstances to be heroic when they never meant to be.

These events are horrible to study, even now. And the arguments involved seem amazingly unimportant at this distance.  But by comparison with what was happening, and what would happen on the Continent, especially the Thirty Years War that gave Hieronymus Bosch a guide to what Hell looked like, they were small and merciful.

Importantly, when they were over a reasonable compromise was available for those who wanted one. I have never seen any reason why the most devout Catholic could not both attend and take a full part in the Anglican services of Morning and Evening Prayer, alongside an equally devout Protestant. These are ancient monastic offices, after all. And even the Anglican Communion Service seems to me to be so worded that a Roman Catholic could take part in it without doing violence to his creed. Many Anglicans who think of themselves as Catholics (but not Roman Catholics) have used this form, with minor variations.

The Anglican wedding service still seems to me to be the most beautiful and the most coherent statement of what marriage ought to be, ever crafted. It is astonishing that for centuries this ceremony, as magnificent and uplifting as a coronation, has been readily available to anyone in the country - though of course modern priests prefer not to use it.

The funeral service, likewise, has a power and seriousness which at least tries to cope with the cold, cruel majesty of death, and the rawness of the open grave on the cold afternoon. The General Thanksgiving (which features rather surprisingly in Sebastian Faulks's ‘Birdsong’) ought to be learned by heart by children. Many of the collects are profound but intensely simple poetry.

By both accident and design the result seems to me to have been remarkably benign, and also rather beautiful and compelling, generally under the direction of learned and broad-minded men who saw that it was often better to blur differences than to emphasise them.  Most important, it has found its way into the English language and into our manners, customs and dealings with each other, and connecting the most ordinary life with religious thought and sentiment.

Even the works of P.G.Wodehouse  contain references to the Authorised Version and to the Prayer Book, and Bible and Prayer Book have huge entries in the 'Oxford Dictionary of Quotations' often of phrases which we use in daily speech without any idea where they came from. English attitudes and behaviour have been formed by this extraordinary flowering of religious poetry. "Why spit on your luck?", W.H.Auden asked, when the Church sought to abandon its most precious possessions. But spit they did, and they're still doing it now. Even so, the lingering afterglow is important in our lives and perhaps not lost forever.

That's why I care about Rowan Williams, and his excursion into the subject of Sharia law. I may generally ignore Archbishop Rowan, as I have little time for his prose style, designed to conceal rather than reveal, in my view. And he seems to me to be a nitwit in worldly matters, having been a dupe of the disarmers back in 1985 - which rather devalues his later opposition to the Iraq war. My Church-of-England-in-exile continues to exist without him, and in spite of him and those like him.

But I am not sure it can survive indefinitely under such leadership. If parsons and bishops wish to rage against each other in factions, Catholic versus Evangelical, then that is a pity and I wish they would stop. There are better things for them to do.  But if the man appointed to head the Christian Church in England declares that the adoption of some aspects of Sharia law "seems unavoidable" in this country; if her muses publicly about the possible recognition of Sharia courts in marital law, financial transactions and mediation (and he undeniably did both these things) then he is toying with something far bigger - the future of England (and Britain) as a Christian society.

For me, the main problem is not what he said, but that it was he who said it. A Muslim cleric, a Guardian leader-writer or a leading academic (perhaps Professor Howard Kirk, as he no doubt now is, Vice Chancellor of the University of Watermouth) might have mouthed this stuff ( and, yes, I have trudged and hacked my way through the whole verbal jungle) and that would have been that.

But for the Archbishop of Canterbury to do this is a clean different thing. Who else, in our ruling elite, is going to argue that we are and must remain a Christian nation, our laws based (as they are) on Christian precept?  Crudely, Dr Williams is paid to defend the Christian faith. To say that something is 'unavoidable' is almost always to say that you aren't prepared to do anything to avoid it, or - worse - that you may actually favour it but daren't say so. Supporters of the European Single Currency would often claim that it, too, was 'inevitable, a very effective way of demoralising people who knew no better and didn't understand its importance.  Most things are avoidable if you have the determination to fight them. Sharia law in Britain certainly is.

I also didn't like his attempt to say that only Muslim 'primitivists' held to the most worrying tenets of Sharia, or that worries about such things were 'dramatic fears'. This isn't so. Look how difficult it is to get Muslim spokesmen to denounce such things as the stoning of adulterous women, or Sharia's penalties for homosexuals. My discussion with Islamic scholars at Deoband a couple of years ago ( all calm, soft-spoken bearded scholars much like Dr Williams) left me pretty sure that they would never budge on things like the lesser position of women, or the death penalty for those who desert Islam. It couldn't be changed, they insisted.

So what is Dr Williams talking about when he speaks of "the free decision to be and continue a member of the umma" (umma being the Arabic name for the body of the Muslim faithful)?

Islam has many doors, but no exits. You cannot leave. This is regarded as non-negotiable by every Muslim cleric I have talked to. So what's this free decision to continue, that Dr Williams talks about?

There's nothing to be gained in calls for Dr Williams to resign. He's not the Home Secretary, and he serves under different rules from those that govern politicians. In any case, it would do no good unless he were replaced by someone better. That can only happen if the people of England decide to take back possession of their national church, and the church, revived, begins to find a new leadership less interested in faction and modernisation, and more interested in the reconversion of England to Christianity.

Hopeless? Probably, but not definitely. If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars. My generation, that of the post-war baby bulge, are the ones almost wholly absent from Britain's churches. You'll find quite a few people in their late 60s and 70s, and in some places a lot of people under 35 in Anglican churches on any Sunday. But those born between 1945 and 1955 generally aren't there (except in the form of clergy and Bishops - Dr Williams was born in 1950). It may just be that the children of the Me Generation are pretty sick of the organised selfishness they see around them, and in the mood for some reasonable Christianity, perhaps with some poetry thrown in. I live in hope.

But, as I've warned before, if the Christian church doesn't take advantage of the approaching religious revival, which I think cannot be long delayed, someone else will. And that someone will argue much more powerfully for Sharia law than Rowan Williams ever did. And I can't see the Muslims, if they become a great force in Britain, paying much attention to the maintenance of a separate Christian law.  They are serious and determined people, who believe staunchly in their religion and hope for its ultimate triumph. So, no, I don't think the Church of England should be allowed to die. We need it more than we ever have.

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At least the Ayatollah of Canterbury is honest, Mr Brown

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The poor old Ayatollah of Canterbury doesn't actually deserve all the slime now being tipped over his modernised mitre. Just some of it.

Of course it is absurd for the chief of the Christian Church in this country to cringe publicly to Islam. But at least Archbishop Williams is open about his unwillingness to defend the faith – as is his colleague, the wretched Bishop of Oxford, who recently announced that he was perfectly happy for loudspeakers to blare the Muslim call to prayer across that city.

Even on their own liberal terms, this pair are clueless about sharia and its scorn for women.
It was exiled Iranian Muslim women who defeated a similar proposal in Canada. They had travelled thousands of miles to escape sharia law and didn't want it in Toronto, thanks very much.

Compare that with the Government, which poses stern-faced as the foe of "terror" and noisily jails figures of fun such as Abu Hamza while greasily pretending that there's no connection between Islam and terrorism.

Gordon Brown's Cabinet has also quietly agreed that Muslim men with more than one wife can now claim benefits for these extra spouses – while bigamy remains a criminal offence for everyone else, punishable by up to seven years in prison.

And what about the discreet little Whitehall celebrations of the Muslim festival of Eid, attended by highly placed civil servants?

Or the incessant multi-faith propaganda in supposedly Christian State schools, where children known to me have been pestered to draw pictures of mosques but are given virtually no instruction in the faith and scripture of our own established Church?

Why is it that in Britain, alone of all countries in the world, the most exalted, educated and privileged have all lost the will to defend their own home? Most of us liked it the way it was before they began to "modernise" it.

I know of nowhere else where those most richly rewarded by a free society are so anxious to trash the place that gave them birth and liberty.

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Helena's Sweeney Todd, a gory slice of musical tripe

What joy to learn that cinemagoers are walking out of the new Tim Burton movie Sweeney Todd once they discover that it is a musical, a fact omitted from the trailers.

Watching Johnny Depp and the increasingly strange Helena Bonham Carter trilling away as the blood flows is hardly a good way of spending an evening, unless the alternative is extraordinary rendition.

Nothing could induce me to go to a Tim Burton film anyway. If I want to be put off my lunch I can always watch Prime Minister's Questions.

But why anyone on earth should wish to watch a musical about cannibalism, I really do not know. What is it about film critics? Why do they praise such weird productions?

This week most of them (though not our excellent Matthew Bond) are simpering about There Will Be Blood, a creepy festival of tedium that drags on for a bladder-busting 150 minutes, contains not one sympathetic character and makes no sense at all.

Go and see the under-rated Charlie Wilson's War instead. There's a fair bit of profanity, but it's funny, true, instructive and worth seeing alone for the moment when Congressman Wilson asks the President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan for a large Scotch.

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Nurturing children - perfect job for 'a mate'

My colleague Liz Jones thinks men should be angry if their "driven, highly educated mate" decides to stay at home and raise the next generation.

Why? They should be pleased. What better use for a good education is there than to pass on what you have learned to your children?

Does Ms Jones really think schools will endow pupils with the wisdom of the ages and sow the seeds of reading, imagination and poetry? Fat chance.

Why is it better to slog off to an office, to stare at computer screens and compose memos in the Martian dialect of modern business before eventually slogging home via the wine bar to collect the children from some day orphanage or bog-standard school, where they will have spent the day having their brains filled with TV rubbish?

This disdain for the most honourable and valuable task that falls to us is a disease in our society. I suspect those who express it are trying to hide from themselves that it is wrong.

If our wounded civilisation lasts another hundred years, our grandchildren will be horrified by the cruel, self-indulgent lies we told ourselves to justify the dumping and neglect of an entire generation, in return for nothing better than cash and handbags.

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We've discovered the blindingly obvious ... yet nothing changes

It's time to set up a University of the Blindingly Obvious, just to cope with all the amazing discoveries about what's wrong with Britain now being made by the people who didn't notice when it mattered.

Warnings issued in this column over the past seven years or so, derided or ignored at the time, are now becoming conventional wisdom, for what that's worth.

Week after week, learned reports emerge concluding that the police spend too much time filling in forms, that children do better with married parents, that multi-culturalism breaks up our society, that mass immigration hurts the poor, that cannabis rots the brain, that social mobility stopped when the grammar schools were closed.

And after the report comes out, absolutely nothing happens. Nothing.

And do you know why? Because our entire Establishment don't care.

They want the police handcuffed by rules designed by Left-wing lawyers.

They like mass immigration. They want to be free to smoke dope, or let their children do it.

They can buy good education for their own young, but prefer egalitarian dud schools for your offspring, because it's a principle, see?

You can be as outraged as you like about this, just as you are about Britannia being removed from the coinage.

You can be completely opposed to the acceleration of anti-marriage propaganda into school sex lessons, under the guidance of homosexual militants.

But will it make any difference? No it won't. Labour, Lib Dem and Tory alike all support these things, and the discredited ideas that lie behind them.

As long as you support any of them, especially the useless, useless Tories – who are worse than the others because they pretend to be against what they're actually for – you'll get exactly what you deserve.

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If all advertising of tobacco products is forbidden, how come the country is plastered with posters urging us to buy cigarette papers? Is it because New Labour doesn't think they will be used for smoking tobacco?

Joined-up government at work.

What are Archbishops for?

 

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

One day someone will produce a dictionary to help us understand what Archbishop Rowan Williams is saying. Most of the time, especially on controversial issues, he is incomprehensible in a lovely, rich, beguiling, poetic voice.

But here's something he is quite clear on, well, not clear actually when you read it again, but clearer than on most things. He doesn't want schools to teach something he refers to as 'creationism'. Now, a lot of rubbish is talked about this subject . There are, it is true, some Christians who believe that God created the world in six days, precisely as it says in the book of Genesis, and that the Earth is much younger than the fossil records show.

Most, however, reckon this beautiful passage of the Bible is not to be taken with literal exactness, though it does contain an important truth about the nature of the universe - that it is ordered, has a purpose and had a beginning. If this isn't so, why should Archbishops carry any more authority than lollipop ladies? Indeed, why have archbishops at all? If we are alone, and John Lennon is right, and everything's an accident, who needs these prelates?

The discussion about this, now flourishing in the USA, is much more interesting than most people in Britain realise. On this side of the ocean, everyone thinks that the theory of evolution is proved and settled, like the theory of flight or the (slightly more flexible) periodic table of the elements. Actually, that's not so. It cannot be. Darwin's theory - and that of his followers - is a heroic and impressive attempt to describe events that no human could ever have witnessed, on the basis of very thin evidence which cannot easily be tested.

And the theory of 'Intelligent Design', in its most powerful form as presented by some notable scientists, makes a far more modest claim. It asks permission for intelligent, educated people to doubt Darwin's theory, just as Darwin gave permission to the Victorians to doubt the existence of God. The Archbishop should read up on this. It could help to make his job more secure.