Lost In The Maze

Having spent Wednesday evening dining rather well before having my mind beautifully improved, I have only just heard this week’s Moral Maze. After having done so, only the affect that it would have on the rest of us prevents me from actively wishing for the Islamic conquest of this country as soon as possible, in order to sweep away a supposed intelligentsia which richly, richly deserves its fate in that event. For that fate would not be martyrdom. It would be the fate of being completely (and I really do mean completely) ignored.

Sarah Dunant repeatedly asserted that there were only six million religious believers in this country. Has she considered contacting the Office of National Statistics? For that Office seems to labour under a very different impression, admittedly arrived at by the vulgar expedient of asking every household in the country and requiring it to respond, rather than around the dinner tables graced with the presence of Ms Dunant.

She also expressed undisguised horror at the notion that there might exist a court which under any circumstance might fail to grant a divorce. She repeatedly alleged that an Orthodox Jewish woman who obtained a civil divorce and then remarried under the civil law would go on to produce legally illegitimate children if she had not also obtained a Rabbinical divorce.

And she claimed that secularism had had to “fight with [I assume that she meant “against”] Christianity to have social justice”, which very term is original to the documents of the Roman Magisterium. Was Lord Shaftesbury a “secular” figure? Was William Wilberforce? Was Disraeli? Were the Christian Socialist pioneers? One could go on. Oh yes, one really could go on.

Ian Hargreaves was not alone in being vexed by the question of polygamy, which nobody managed to mention was neither obligatory nor even especially common in Islam, yet has reprehensibly been provided for by the benefits system for some years. Nor did it occur to anyone to ask why polygamy was otherwise illegal here, and how long that has been the case. It is illegal because of Christianity, and it has therefore been illegal since this land became Christian, rather a long time ago.

Neither the Catholic Clifford Longley nor the half-Spanish Michael Portillo took on a Muslim interviewee when he trotted out the Spanish Inquisition.

Another interviewee was Polly Toynbee. Like Sarah Dunant, she was aghast that any court might ever fail to grant a woman a divorce (men are presumably a different matter). She was similarly affronted that any court might ever award custody of a child to the father rather than to the mother. She had absolute confidence (and clearly assumed that so had everyone else) in this country’s secret, slapdash, hearsay-ridden, fanatically anti-male and anti-working-class family courts, among the very few courts in the world that can make Sharia ones look quite attractive. And she threw in the ever-more-common canard that the increase (such as there has been) in the number of Catholics has been due to Polish immigration.

But the worst of the lot was Portillo. That man was once seriously considered as a potential future Prime Minister! Yet he managed to say “our secular state” and “our basic constitutional settlement” in course of a single sentence. He spoke of an “absence of religious controversy written into the law”, in contrast to unspecified foreign lands.

And he impatiently insisted that the religion influencing our political development was the Church of England, “chosen” because it was “wishy-washy”. Well, it was certainly no such thing when it started, nor for most of its history. And it has had at least no more political influence than Scottish Presbyterianism, or Nonconformity, or Catholicism. But Portillo appeared not to know any of this.

Indeed, like the rest of them, he appeared not to know anything very much at all. Where does the BBC find these people?

Still, it could be worse. At least there really are alternatives to them, if the Beeb and others could be bothered to seek them out. We could be in the US, where the “choice” (not remotely reflective of public opinion, I might add) is between people like that and the advocates of “Manifest Destiny”, “God’s Own Country” pseudo-Christianity.