20 January 2013 12:01 AM
Out nation is on its knees to the Church of Human Rights
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
That is why it was no use anyone going to the Strasbourg Court to win back Christianity’s lost status as the dominant faith of Britain. The Church has been humiliated. Britain no longer exists.
True, you can now wear a cross while working for British Airways. But you have that freedom because you are now just another protected minority, which has no more rights or standing than other faiths, such as Atheism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism or Hinduism.
In fact, the Christian religion is worse off than all the others because it has to be constantly reminded that it is not the national religion any more.
This means regular slaps and humiliations of the kind handed out by occupying powers to troublesome peoples not yet used to being subjugated.
The most devastating of these was delivered two years ago by Lord Justice Laws, who personally humbled Lord Carey, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, before jeering at religious opinions as ‘irrational’.
He intoned: ‘The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other.’
I don’t like this judgment, but it is a deadly accurate statement of the position.
This country’s official faith, as people are slowly discovering, is a code of ideas called ‘Equality and Diversity’, based on several European Directives but put into law in Britain mainly through the Equality Act 2010.
The continued existence of a few rather wet bishops in the House of Lords, and various other baubles and trinkets in odd corners of the constitution, means nothing against the Equality and Diversity bulldozer, enacted by Harriet Harman with the willing help of her Tory counterpart, Theresa May. Its demands are written into the contracts of public employees, and supported by the politically correct public-sector unions.
Private firms that do business with the State are roped in. So are (as we have learned in recent years) the owners of small hotels and cafes, adoption agencies, housing associations and councils that have prayers before they meet.
It controls thought and speech in a new post-modern way. Today’s liberal bigots don’t crudely threaten to throw people in prison for saying things they disapprove of. That might result in protests even from the increasingly spineless people of this country. Instead, they menace our livelihoods. Speak out and you lose your job, with little hope of ever getting another.
This is, of course, tyrannical and brutal. But because it is not the Gestapo, the Stasi or the Gulag, we don’t recognise it for what it is.
And because it is done in the name of ‘Rights’ – which sound reassuring and friendly – we do not realise that it is, in fact, a deep and shameful wrong. And so it grows worse each day.
Spirit makes great TV – not scenery
Please don’t be put off Alan Furst’s marvellous, twilit spy novels after the disappointing BBC TV version of his work The Spies Of Warsaw, which starred David Tennant and Janet Montgomery. As so often, the makers have spent a small fortune on clothes, cars and steam engines, but somehow failed to capture the spirit.
Furst is a former journalist whose books are intelligent, realistic and full of historical knowledge and understanding.
They have plenty of sex, steam trains and drama, too – but rather better done than they were in the BBC’s script.
Furst is a former journalist whose books are intelligent, realistic and full of historical knowledge and understanding.
They have plenty of sex, steam trains and drama, too – but rather better done than they were in the BBC’s script.
The Great War: A bloodbath we should never have waded into
As the centenary of the modern world’s greatest and most avoidable tragedy creeps closer, some people are trying to make out that the First World War was worth fighting. Twaddle.
The generals were useless. The politicians were worse. The methods of both sides – from poison gas and the bombing of homes, to the deliberate starvation of civilians through blockade – were barbaric. The whole thing led directly to both Stalin and Hitler.
And we would have been far better off if we had stayed out. Germany was bound to dominate Europe anyway. Yet we sacrificed legions of our best young men, and lost our wealth and our Empire, in a futile attempt to prevent the inevitable.
Which is why, when Germany finally did take over Europe through the EU, we were among the countries that lost their independence. If we’d stayed out in 1914, my guess is that we would still be rich, independent and free, rather than as we are, supplicants of Berlin and Washington.
The generals were useless. The politicians were worse. The methods of both sides – from poison gas and the bombing of homes, to the deliberate starvation of civilians through blockade – were barbaric. The whole thing led directly to both Stalin and Hitler.
And we would have been far better off if we had stayed out. Germany was bound to dominate Europe anyway. Yet we sacrificed legions of our best young men, and lost our wealth and our Empire, in a futile attempt to prevent the inevitable.
Which is why, when Germany finally did take over Europe through the EU, we were among the countries that lost their independence. If we’d stayed out in 1914, my guess is that we would still be rich, independent and free, rather than as we are, supplicants of Berlin and Washington.
I wouldn't dare guess whether the horrors in Algeria are connected to the wild French adventure in Mali, which we so oddly backed. I doubt we’ll ever know for sure. Like anyone else, I just grieve for the dead.
But I would ask how our flailing foreign policy can possibly make sense. We cheer on chaos in the Arab world and then complain about its results. And we mobilise against Islamist militants in Mali, while actively encouraging and equipping such groups in Syria.
Is there something they’re not telling us, or is our foreign policy, in fact, as moronic as it looks? History suggests that the second explanation is the right one.
But I would ask how our flailing foreign policy can possibly make sense. We cheer on chaos in the Arab world and then complain about its results. And we mobilise against Islamist militants in Mali, while actively encouraging and equipping such groups in Syria.
Is there something they’re not telling us, or is our foreign policy, in fact, as moronic as it looks? History suggests that the second explanation is the right one.
Another thought about free speech in modern Britain. It seems as if there is a ‘report’ or a ‘commission’ calling for feebler drug laws almost every two or three weeks. All these are given wide publicity in the papers and on the BBC.
But when I wrote my recent book on the subject – The War We Never Fought – which takes a different view and contains many important new facts, most major newspapers disdained even to review it, and there has been almost no interest from the BBC.
You can tell the truth. But will anyone hear? Or listen?
But when I wrote my recent book on the subject – The War We Never Fought – which takes a different view and contains many important new facts, most major newspapers disdained even to review it, and there has been almost no interest from the BBC.
You can tell the truth. But will anyone hear? Or listen?
Personally I can wait until the end of time to learn the contents of Mr Slippery’s Great Speech on Europe. We all know what will be in it – a cunningly worded promise of a referendum, non-binding and conditional on him winning the next Election, which he won’t.
It’s mainly designed to fight off the UKIP challenge. Amazingly, he continues to claim that we can win powers back from the EU without leaving it. I sometimes wonder if he actually knows that this is impossible. Which would you rather – a Prime Minister who was ignorant, or one who was dishonest?
It’s mainly designed to fight off the UKIP challenge. Amazingly, he continues to claim that we can win powers back from the EU without leaving it. I sometimes wonder if he actually knows that this is impossible. Which would you rather – a Prime Minister who was ignorant, or one who was dishonest?
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