Britannia Radio

The problem isn’t the Pope, it’s the Vatican of political correctness

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Actually, I am uneasy about the Pope telling us what to do. This is part of being British, or was when I was growing up. I can still recite great chunks of Tennyson’s wonderful Ballad Of The Fleet, all about Sir Richard Grenville and the little ship Revenge, with her valiant Protestant crew, fighting her unequal battle against the great sea-castles of King Philip, ‘the Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain’.

I had relatives who viewed the Vatican as Babylon. I was taught at school about Bloody Mary, 400 years later still a loathed figure.

Even now, I like to roll over my tongue the defiant 37th of the English Church’s 39 articles: ‘The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.’

The Pope’s warning about growing intolerance of Christianity in the British State should have been issued by the Church of England, and once could have been. But its present leaders are for the most part pretty dim, and almost all liberals – whereas Benedict is a serious thinker, a major intellect and a conservative.

Those who are outraged – or claim to be – about the Pontiff’s warning from Rome are trying to use a force they don’t really sympathise with. My anti-Catholic forebears were Cromwellian Puritans, and would have loathed the sexual revolution even more than they disliked the RC Church. And if these protesters are worried about foreign intervention in British affairs, they are looking in the wrong direction.

Harriet Harman’s ‘Equality’ Bill, a monstrous piece of far-Left fanaticism, flows mainly from the ideas of continental Marxists who knew little of Britain and cared less.

And – here’s the really important bit – its planned attempt to force the Churches to hire openly homosexual employees against their will have originated in that Vatican of political correctness, the European Union.

I have the document in front of me, though our leaders have tried to keep it secret and Brussels has never officially released it. It is a ‘Reasoned Opinion’ on ‘infringement No 2006/ 2450’, signed by Commissioner Vladimir Spidla, and it orders the British Government, its subordinate, to amend the law of this country.

It declares that the United Kingdom has ‘failed to fulfil its obligation to transpose correctly Articles 2(4), 4 and 9 of Council Directive 2000/78/EC of 27 November 2000’. It goes on to ‘invite’ this country to ‘take the necessary measures to comply’. If we don’t, we’ll end up being ordered to act by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

Beside this peremptory stuff, it seems to me that a sermon from the Bishop of Rome is pretty small beer.

It’s not foreign interference the sexual revolutionaries are against. It’s any sort of opposition to their semi-secret elite plan to do away with traditional morality in these islands and everywhere else. So who is really interfering in our way of life?

* How to reduce the deficit? Well, perhaps we might ditch the joint New Labour/New Tory policy of letting convicted prisoners have TV sets in their cells. Fewer than two per cent of prisoners don’t get this ‘privilege’, and in the past two years you have helped pay for 27,000 new colour sets, each with a remote control, for this purpose.


Hague kowtows to a grim tyrant

I used to have some time for William Hague. Not any more. I discover that this supposedly principled Conservative recently visited Cuba, that imprisoned island, and there met members of its repellent tyranny.

A spokesman says: ‘He had a three-hour meeting and lunch with Cuba’s foreign minister, including a vigorous discussion on democracy and human rights. This would not have been possible had he met opposition figures on the same visit.’

Whyever not? And if not, why go at all? Cuba is one of the grimmest dictatorships on the planet. Its leading dissident, Oswaldo Paya, is a man of great principle and lives under siege. Would the Cuban Stalinists have dared to interfere if Mr Hague had gone to meet him, as he should have done?

Mr Hague was accompanied on this curious trip by the mysterious Lord Ashcroft, widely known as ‘the man who bought the Tory Party’. What is he getting for his millions?

* When we eventually find out what Friday’s latest surrender to IRA terror actually involved, will anyone wonder if it’s really true that the world’s most successful terror gang has put its weapons ‘beyond use’? Why else are we all so afraid of them? Why do they always get their way in ‘negotiations’? Just asking.

Medicine with a Stalinist face

The Lancet, a medical journal published since 1823, has nauseatingly ‘retracted’ an article it printed in 1998 – you’ll have guessed that it was Andrew Wakefield’s cautious suggestion that there might be risks associated with MMR.

Well, I’d be surprised if this was the only article in The Lancet’s 187-year archives that has run into controversy. I think this retraction is sinister and creepy, redolent of the Stalinist habit of air-brushing murdered ex-Politburo members out of the picture.

Removing embarrassing articles from the archives of ‘The Times’ was in fact Winston Smith’s job in 1984. What purpose is served by pretending you never published something? Not a good one.

* A simple point about why the climate-change zealots turn out to have put so much credulous rubbish into their propaganda. They believe it because they want to. Scientists (and we are constantly told these people are scientists) are specifically supposed not to do this.