The Smear Test

From James Delingpole to the National Secular Society, the cry is that the economy in general and the organisation of banking in particular are none of the Archbishop of Canterbury's business. But he is a Member of Parliament and of the Privy Council, unless Delingpole would like that to change, or even if he would.

And if the churches are not going to create things like regional banking, or alternatives to usury, or financial institutions in which retail and investment banking are strictly separated while only provenly prudent persons are allowed anywhere near either, then no one else will. No one else ever has. How, where, when, why and by whom does anyone think that mutual building societies, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies and trustee savings banks were ever founded?

If the national consolidation of that last is to be revived, then I propose that the trustees be appointed by four bodies that recently issued an excoriating collective denunciation of the present Government's un-Christian persecution of the poor: the Church of Scotland (a minister of which founded the first ever trustee savings bank), the Methodist Church, the United Reformed Church, and the Baptist Union.

It never occurs to someone like Delingpole that it was the Conservative Party, and not the Church of England, that moved and changed, destroying the alliance that he recalls as such an unquestioned constant of his childhood and youth. Like so many people, he has managed to convince himself that anarcho-capitalism is Toryism, and to convince himself of that within an inherited intellectual and emotional paradigm in which Toryism is Christianity, or at least C of E Christianity.

In reality, that economic system has no Tory roots whatever, and has a long, continuing history of opposition to any religious involvement, as such, in public policy. An opposition which Delingpole is now voicing as fiercely as, say, Nick Cohen, who needs to answer the questions asked above.

Anarcho-capitalism has an infinitesimal following, actual or potential, in this country. That following is made up only of people at the odder end of the spectrum, to put matters at their very politest. But the Conservative Party no longer has the rather un-Friedmanite monopoly even on that. Another UKIP scandal, or at least embarrassment, now presents itself whichever political website one visits, and on each occasion that one visits any of them.

There is no point crying about "smears". This is called politics, and the UKIP lot wanted it. If they really would rather talk about policy, then they might like to talk about how, on this week's Question Time, Nigel Farage gave up the flat tax, one of the very, very few policies that his party had. Yet again today, Godfrey Bloom took to the airwaves to say that women of child-bearing age ought to be refused employment simply on that basis.

There will be more. There is evermore, and more, and more, and more, and more.