26 December 2009 9:53 PM
How long before small boys here ask: A church? What’s that, Grandad?
I had hoped to have a sort of Christmas truce this week, but the controversy just keeps on raging, drowning out the choirs and bells. And one of the problems is Christmas itself. How much longer will it exist in the form we know today? I fear it won’t be much longer. Many of its traditions are visibly dying. Teachers complain that children don’t know the carols any more, because their parents don’t know them either. At a couple of packed services during Advent (a season many haven’t heard of), I’ve noticed that large numbers of adults stand with their lips not moving during the singing of these simple, easily mastered songs. Perhaps they’re humming, or struck dumb with awe, but it looks to me as if they are just completely unfamiliar with words or music and don’t know what to do.
For the moment, they still think they should come to church, but for how much longer? A few days ago I heard a story from the former East Germany, where Christianity was coldly tolerated but officially discouraged, and as far as possible denied to children. This created a mixture of hostility and indifference that has not been overcome in the 20 years since the regime collapsed. The link between people and Christianity, many centuries old, has now been broken. A small boy was walking with his grandparent past a church in a small town in Brandenburg. ‘What’s that strange building? What’s it for?’ he asked.
But East Germany wasn’t half as subtle as the politically correct revolutionaries who run this country. Our lot are far cleverer. They hope to destroy the Christian religion through a thousand regulations. But first they have to rob it of its ancient standing by treating it as equal (if not slightly inferior) to Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. The modern Left don’t hate these religions, because they are not their own and they weren’t brought up in them. So they love celebrating Eid and Diwali in schools, and smile indulgently at public employees who take Muslim religious holidays or go on pilgrimage.
And now, increasingly, we see a freezing official intolerance of Christianity in the State sector, a campaign that will be spread to the private sector eventually by cunning regulation and the rules over awarding contracts. I believe in a pretty reserved sort of religion myself, and wouldn’t necessarily welcome it if a nurse or a teacher offered to pray for me. But I think I could make the point politely myself. What is actively sinister is the way that such people are now threatened with disciplinary action.
It is quite a small thing now.
But if you study the binding codes of conduct and practice of many trades and professions, you will find that they all contain the same little provision. You must promote equality and support diversity. This rule comes from the EU, which makes most of our laws, and which recently refused to put any mention of Christianity, the basis of European civilisation, in its constitution. Equality and diversity are codewords for political correctness, and these codes make it compulsory.
Watch out for increasing attacks on Christian State schools, on official or public celebration of Christian festivals. The word ‘Christmas’ is already slipping out of use in police forces and local authorities.
If you don’t protest, these will succeed. By the time the BBC relegates Carols From King’s to a special minority channel, replacing it with a football match or a ‘special Holiday edition of Strictly Come Dancing’, we will be so used to this sort of thing that we will barely notice it. And then Christmas will be gone.
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Another happy snap from the mad world of ‘global warming’
Odd, isn’t it? Most of our media have now swallowed the man-made global warming cult so completely that the coldest December in recent memory, here and abroad, has generally been covered with hardly any attempt to explain how this fits in with the idea that the polar ice-caps are about to melt away and drown us all.
I know perfectly well that one cold winter doesn’t necessarily mean that the planet isn’t getting warmer, but this month’s hard frosts are not by any means the only indicator that the whole theory may be wrong. That is the reason for the fuss about the leaked emails, suggesting that scientists may not have been scrupulous about the truth.
Supporters of the panic ask why so many people remain convinced of the warmist theory. Haven’t they heard of embarrassment? If you have ordered everyone into the lifeboats because the ship is sinking, and the ship fails to sink, it is very hard to admit you were wrong – especially if you’ve drifted too far away to get back aboard.
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The old could do with help too, William
There's nothing wrong with Prince William spending a night dossing on the London streets, and I’m all in favour of the many fine charities that try to get rough sleepers out of their doorways and into jobs and real homes. But I wish we would stop referring to these poor people as ‘homeless’ as if their plight resulted from a shortage of housing. It is mainly caused by other things: the increasing number of broken families, and especially of abusive step-parents; the disastrous spread of drug-taking, especially that worst of all drugs, the mind-wrecking cannabis which is stupidly promoted as ‘soft’ by evil and selfish people who should know better; and the closure of so many mental hospitals under the mistaken ‘Care in the Community’ programme.
Also, this Christmas, there are other people whose plight needs Royal publicity, especially the lonely, vulnerable old – huge numbers of men and women, to whom we owe much, living in poverty and in fear of
feral neighbours.
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Two Brains and two contradictory ideas on marriage
Yes, it’s the Useless Tories again. I’ll make them a New Year offer. If they stop being useless, I’ll stop attacking them for it.
But here comes David Willetts – so-called Two Brains – the intellectual powerhouse of the Cameron revolution. In a flattering and friendly interview with (of course) the anti-British, heavily State-subsidised Guardian newspaper, Mr Willetts accurately warns that marriage is dying out except among the rich.
Why is this? Because the State actively encourages fatherless families with social housing and benefits, and through anti-marriage sex-education in schools. Mr Willetts has many times emphatically rejected any attempt to do anything about this, falsely describing the real defence of marriage as a ‘war on single
mothers’. He needs two brains to carry two contradictory ideas in the same head.
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There is something grimly funny about Gerry Adams’s denunciation of his late father as a child abuser. Which is worse? Being the leading apologist for terrorist murder in the British Isles, or being a paedophile? Gerry Senior, being dead, cannot defend himself against these allegations. One wonders what might be said about Gerry Junior when he is no longer among us.
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Do not forget, at this season of feasting, that soldiers are still dying and being maimed in Afghanistan and that the Government cannot explain why.
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