Guarding The Marches

Dr Peter Foster, the Anglican Bishop of Chester, was on the Today programme, and dear old John Humphrys clearly thought that he was onto a winner.

But no, his guest did not accept that free speech included the right to insult the Pope at public expense. And yes, he did think (he comes from the Evangelical wing, which at its more scholarly level has been quietly shifting back to Biblical principles on this for while) that the Catholic Church had a point about the disconnection between sex and procreation. Indeed, he put the two together by decrying the present epidemic of pornography, which he identified as at once unacceptably over-free speech, and sex without its proper purpose.

Like two Labour Peers who were in or around the Callaghan Government, Dr Foster is also on the Advisory Board of Nigel Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation.

"A bulwark against errors more fundamental than its own," Cardinal Newman called the Church of England. He may yet have been onto something.