Exposed In All Its Vice

One John R. Bradley has a truly wicked, classically neoconservative article in this week's Spectator, bemoaning the fall of the Ben Ali regime because what is replacing it is closing the brothels, prohibiting an intoxicant (alcohol, as it happens) abhorrent to the bulk of the population, allowing places of worship to be unshuttered outside prayer times, and permitting men to grow beards without the indulgence of the local police. Bradley now raises such spectres as an end to abortion, an end to "frank sex education compulsory in schools", and an end to children's having it "drummed into their heads that religion and politics were distinct and separate". Imagine!

That last would have come as news to the hereditary barons and the trade union barons who used the Victorian Liberal Party against opium dens, unregulated drinking and gambling, and seven-day working weeks, all of which have returned to "post-Christian" Britain, just as the extension of the franchise has effectively been reversed. It would have come as news to the Tory Wilberforce in his fight against the slave trade, to the Tory Shaftesbury in his fight against child labour and horrific factory conditions, and to the Tory Disraeli in his social reforms and, again, his extension of the franchise. And it would have come as news to the founders of the Labour Movement in their synthesis of those Liberal strands, those Tory strands, and Catholic Social Teaching.

For that matter, it would have come as news to the American Civil Rights movement, or to the network that ended up literally hacking down the Berlin Wall, or to the shipyard workers of Gdansk, or to the organised opposition to apartheid, especially within the black majority. Among so very, very, very many others.