Respect

Notice that this hugely important debate is being conducted only between UKIP and Respect, with the "main" parties nowhere to be seen or heard. And it exposes the disenfranchisement of those traditional, and therefore former, Labourites who find ourselves in agreement with a party now led by a Thatcher bag-carrier. Rather than with a party led by an Old Labour Catholic who has nevertheless somehow managed to get mixed up with Trots and Islamists.

Face-covering - not head-covering, but face-covering - is incompatible with the conduct of British social and cultural life. Halal meat is, not least, a serviceable weapon in the armoury against the hunting ban, but animal sacrifice is totally unacceptable. So is polygamy. There is nothing any more acceptable about male than about female genital mutilation.

While certainly not without sympathy for opposition to usury, Sharia law must have no legal status in this country. There should not be Muslim schools here, where my own Catholic schools have existed since a good thousand years before any other kind did.

We must expunge the influence of the despotic, misogynistic and Jew-hating Gulf monarchies in general, and of despotic, viciously misogynistic and fanatically Jew-hating Saudi Arabia in particular. And the public holidays in this country should be Christian festivals rather than pointless celebrations of the mere fact that the banks are on holiday; there is no case for non-Christian festivals to be public holidays here, nor, for that matter, for public holidays on purely Catholic feast days.

And mosques in the West must not have domes and minarets, which are triumphalistic manifestations of an Islamised society, culture and polity, and which were in that spirit added to former churches during Islam’s forcible overrunning of the Eastern Roman Empire. I have - in Cardiff, if it matters - already seen them stuck onto a nineteenth-century Nonconformist chapel. I suspect there to be many other such examples, especially in the old Methodist and Congregationalist West Riding. How long before Mediaeval cathedrals and village churches go the same way? It happened to the cathedrals and the village churches of Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, the Levant and North Africa, all of which were once integral parts of Christendom.