On The Ropes

On, and on, and on John Humphyrs banged. Not that Archbishop Bernard Longley was particularly good, it must be said. But Humphrys was determined to force him to sign up to the catastrophically failed HIV policy of the ageing hippies in the NGO Establishment, who would cheerfully see the entire population of Africa die of AIDS rather than brook, so to speak, the slightest criticism or compromise of the sexual revolution, which they see as a self-evident good.

Humphrys also insisted that because, as he could not demonstrate, the majority of White British Catholics dissented from the Church's Teaching on this, that or the other, then that Teaching would have to change accordingly. Such is the racism of Anglican liberals, but the Catholic Church mercifully does not work like that.

And then there was Polly Toynbee, who should stick to the social justice, a term of Papal invention, on which she is such an important voice. Her contribution this morning was utterly unhinged, trotting out the standard embittered claim that the simple peasants had not understood the religion question on the census, and reaching its crescendo with the claim that "the Church's views on sex and death are dominating Britain", particularly on assisted suicide, where one really would have thought that it was the BMA, not much of a Vatican puppet, any more than is the WHO that strongly commends Natural Family Panning.