31 Aug

Celebrating cultural diversity with knives, blood and acid

“I’ve never known of a single murder at the Glastonbury Festival,” said Commander David Musker, the man in charge of policing this year’s Notting Hill Carnival.

He was replying to an accusation by a “rapper” known to his fans as Stormzy who had claimed that the police precautions against looting and violence at the Carnival targeted only “black events.”

(Wasn’t it rather racist of Stormzy to introduce apartheid in this way?)

Stormzy taunted Mr  Musker’s officers: “Where were you guys at Glastonbury?”

As a pre-emptive tactic before last weekend’s  three days of anarchy, the police made around 300 arrests and this is what enraged Stormzy. But, Stormzy and his mates aside, no reasonable person could argue that the police action was unjustified in the light of the fact that the 2016 event turned into a riot in which six people were stabbed and 454 arrested.

The cost of policing this annual cultural extravaganza is £7 milion.

Besides the customary knives and guns, this year offered a novelty when two people had their faces sprayed with acid.

So did the Notting Hill Carnage 2017 live up to previous years?

It looks as if it excelled itself.

This year twenty-eight police officers were injured by the mob. Bottles were thrown at them – but then that’s only par for the course. In 2017 blood was spat at them as well.

The carnival has got so dangerous that Ken Marsh, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, would like Stormzy’s annual “black event” to be banned. He asked, “What other event would be allowed to carry on regardless with so many police colleagues under attack?”

He added, “If this is the norm, it is unacceptable. It is a disgrace. Twenty-eight brave colleagues went to work this weekend and were attacked just for doing their job. This is not normal.”

Altogether 312 arrests were made, 58 for possession of an offensive weapon, knife or blade.

The dictionary defines “carnival” as “A special occasion of public enjoyment and entertainment involving wearing unusual clothes, dancing, eating and drinking, usually in the streets of a city.”

The dictionary might like to add, “With the chance of being stabbed, spattered in blood and having acid thrown in your face.”

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the London Assembly has declared, “Championing black culture is as important as ever and Carnival should continue.”

Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, notoriously told us that we must put up with the occasional terrorist atrocity as “Part and parcel of living in a major city.”

Similarly, what are twenty-eight injured police officers – so long as “black culture” continues?

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30 Aug

The art of the impossible

I have long wondered what makes Janet Daley’s writing so tenebrously dull. A recitation of the fat stock prices would have more interest, the speaking clock subtler nuance. If she were to write about a kaleidoscope, it would be in black and white.

It can’t be because she’s American. Mark Twain was American and he wasn’t dull. Neither was Ezra Pound who wrote, “The reader deserves from time to time to be refreshed by shards of ecstasy.” Daley’s prose is as refreshing as a lorry-load of slurry.

Happily my puzzlement has at last been dispersed. Writing (about herself) this week in the Daily Telegraph, Daley says,

“Political argument and debate seem to me to encompass – or at least affect – almost everything that matters in the human condition. How we are governed defines our social relations, our life opportunities, our moral choices and our civil responsibilities. In democratic societies, there is a particular responsibility for people to make informed decisions, not only about who is  to be in power but about the limits and function of government itself.”

See what I mean?

What does she know of politics who only politics knows?

Political conversation  is not everything – not even “almost” everything – that matters in the human condition. What scope, beyond that of leisurely diversion, does her definition of what matters leave to art, literature, music, philosophy  and even, God help us, theology?

We practise these things, Ms Daley, so that we do not die of politics.

Politicos themselves sometimes acknowledge this truth. Even Ken Livingston has his newts, John Major could be not inconsiderably interesting on the subject of motorway cones and Matthew Parris has written gaily about his exploits on Hampstead Heath.

I wonder if there is a cure for Janet’s political monotony?

I think there is. She could try writing her memoirs. Suggested title: Homage to Catatonia

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23 Aug

Fools, damn fools and modern biblical critics

Sometimes a report is so uninformative, inaccurate, vague and generally fatuous that it’s not worth the paper it’s written on. In most such cases we can simply pay the report no attention, grimace frustrated and toss it into the wastepaper basket. But when the subject under  the report’s review is as important as the interpretation of Scripture, as a priest I feel I owe it as a matter of pastoral care to spell out what’s wrong . In today’s Daily Telegraph there is such a report and it begins thus:

“The earliest Latin interpretation of the Gospels has been brought to light by a British academic – and it suggests that readers should not take the Bible literally.”

So this has only very recently been “brought to light” has it by, as the article goes on to mention, Dr Hugh Houghton of the University of Birmingham?  Well, I have news for Dr Houghton and for Olivia Rudgard who wrote that Telegraph article:

Throughout the centuries there have actually been only a very few scholars and ordinary readers who have taken the Bible literally – and for a very good (and obvious) reason: most of the Bible does not consist of propositions of fact.

Much of the Bible is poetry and hymns. How, for example, would anyone go about taking a line such as “The Lord’s my shepherd” literally? Or “I am a worm and no man”?

No one has ever believed that when the Bible says God made the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested means that God formed the universe in six days of twenty-four hours and on the following day he took to his pipe and slippers and sat back in an easy chair.

Or that one of Solomon’s lovers really had a neck that was “a tower of ivory.”

Or that “the stars of heaven fell to the earth.”

To continue to enumerate examples would be the exploit of an imbecile. Besides, there are other aspects of this dismal tale to consider….

Dr Houghton says, “There’s been an assumption that the Bible is a literal record of truth – a lot of the early scholars got very worried about inconsistencies between Matthew and Luke for example.”

No, they didn’t get very worried. They were scholars, not idiots. They noticed differences between Matthew and Luke – that Matthew has wise men visiting the manger while Luke mentions only shepherds – and they concluded that these variations didn’t evidence contradictoriness but two different theological perspectives. Similarly, no one in his right mind would conclude that because the synoptic Gospels declare that the crucifixion happened on one particular day while John says it happened on a different day that therefore the crucifixion never happened.

That may be how dumb literalists and contemporary theological academics think but it is not how the early biblical commentators and the Church Fathers thought.

The fact is – and it has been well-recognised by scholars and general readers for a thousand years and more – that much of the Bible is in the similes and metaphors of poetic expression; and that the biblical narrative lends itself to allegorical interpretation. The masters of that craft were such as Origen and Augustine in the earliest centuries of Christian history.

And they didn’t need to wait for Dr Houghton to come along and explain to them their own method! 

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21 Aug

The Eclipse of the USA

The USA is about to be plunged into the darkness of a total lunar eclipse. Might this physical darkness be an outward and visible sign of a political darkness descending on that nation?

Ironically – weirdly – the last time a total eclipse occurred exclusively in the USA was in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence.

Is the belief in signs and portents only superstition, the stuff of astrologers, necromancers and soothsayers – something which we have discarded since the scientific Enlightenment?

Jesus said, “There shall be signs in the sun and in the moon and in the stars, and upon the earth distress of nations with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth.” (Luke 21: 25-26)

But he also said, “This is an evil generation; they seek a sign.” (Luke 11:29)

In other words, there will be signs but we’re not to look for them.

Jesus’ own birth was accompanied by the Bethlehem Star  (Matthew 2:2)

Shakespeare gives voice to the belief that events in the heavens prefigure or correspond in some way with events on earth and he says on Julius Caesar, “When beggars die, there are no comets seen: the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”

In 1952 the analytical psychologist C.G. Jung and the Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli published a paper Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle in which they argued that there is another – “force” is the wrong word – another something expressing the interconnectedness of events. They gave examples and attempted an explanation:

The French writer Émile Deschamps claimed in his memoirs that, in 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger named Monsieur de Fontgibu. Ten years later, the writer encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him that the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Fontgibu. Many years later, in 1832, Deschamps was at a dinner and once again ordered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fontgibu was missing to make the setting complete – and in the same instant, the now-senile de Fontgibu entered the room.

Jung wrote, after describing such examples, “When coincidences pile up in this way, one cannot help being impressed by them – for the greater the number of terms in such a series, or the more unusual its character, the more improbable it becomes.”]

In his book Thirty Years That Shook Physics – The Story of Quantum Theory (1966), George Gamow writes about Wolfgang Pauli, who was apparently considered a person particularly associated with synchronicity events. Gamow whimsically refers to the “Pauli effect”, a mysterious phenomenon which is not understood on a purely materialistic basis, and probably never will be. The following anecdote is told:

“It is well known that theoretical physicists cannot handle experimental equipment; it breaks whenever they touch it. Pauli was such a good theoretical physicist that something usually broke in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the threshold. A mysterious event that did not seem at first to be connected with Pauli’s presence once occurred in Professor J. Franck’s laboratory in Göttingen. Early one afternoon, without apparent cause, a complicated apparatus for the study of atomic phenomena collapsed. Franck wrote humorously about this to Pauli at his Zürich address and, after some delay, received an answer in an envelope with a Danish stamp. Pauli wrote that he had gone to visit Bohr and at the time of the mishap in Franck’s laboratory his train was stopped for a few minutes at the Göttingen railroad station. You may believe this anecdote or not, but there are many other observations concerning the reality of the Pauli Effect!”

Bunkum or what? Or are there more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy? 

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18 Aug

WW2: Don’t blame the Germans–it was the terrorists wot dun it

The front pages are full of it with headlines: “Massacre….Terrorism…Evil strikes again…Holiday horror…” The always enterprising Sun sports “BASTARDS!”

Why will none of these editors tell the true story?

We know who the “Terrorists” are. We know who are inflicting “Massacre” and the “Horror.”  In every case they are Muslims. “Muslim” is the most accurate description of the perpetrators. Some may be Somali – but not all. Some Pakistani – but not all. Some Palestinian – again not all.

But they are all  Muslims. Moreover, they commit their atrocities explicitly in the name of Islam. Before bombing a tube train or driving a truck into a crowd of shoppers, they don’t exclaim, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” Or “The serenity of Gautama be always with you.”

They yell, “Allahu Akbar!” which translated means, “Our god is greater than your god.”

Muslims are committing these atrocities every day of the week  across four continents.

Only when we acknowledge this fact might we learn how to beat this enemy. But no, we pussyfoot around with evasions and euphemisms. The West is dying of political correctness.

Lake me take you back to the Blitz on London. The BBC newsreader didn’t come on the wireless the morning after an air raid to inform the nation, “Last night terrorist aeroplanes once again bombed the capital, destroyed many homes and killed more than a hundred Londoners.”

No, newsreaders in those days were honest. they came on and said plainly, “Last night German bombers dropped many tons of high explosive on the City of London.”

Once we had thus correctly identified the enemy, our soldiers, sailors and airmen worked out how to fight back most efficiently. And so in the end – not the terrorists or the anonymous perpetrators of horror – but the GERMANS were defeated.

As in 1941, so in 2017, there is a world war on. And this world war has been going on for a lot longer than the last one.

This is obvious to everyone except politicians and newspaper editors.

Here are some words of Professor Marcello Pera, a philosopher and former president of the Italian Senate:

“Is there a war? I answer, yes there is a war and I believe the responsible thing is to recognise it and to say so, regardless of whether the politically-correct thing to do is to keep our mouths shut.

“In Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ossetia, the Phillipines, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Palestinian Territories, Egypt, Morocco and much of the Islamic and Arab world, large groups of fundamentalists, radicals, extremists – the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brothers, Islamic Jihad, the Islamic Armed Group and many more have declared a holy war on the West. This is not my imagination. It is a message they have proclaimed, written, preached, communicated and circulated in black and white. Why should I not take note of it?”

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17 Aug

Rees-Mogg versus the Mockers and the Gigglers

Why is Jacob Rees-Mogg so mocked and derided? Theresa May said she “giggled” when it was suggested he might be a candidate for the Tory leadership.

“Giggled”? That’s nothing: I wept when the stupendously incompetent and inept Theresa May was promoted to high office.

In fact Rees-Mogg is by no means universally mocked. That still considerable number of sensible and informed people, who can read behind the blather of the headlines and the idiocy of the political commentators, see in Jacob much to admire. His speeches and articles are well-received.

But he is derided. Never mind: he is derided only by those people for whom we ought to reserve our derision. You know who I mean: the political timeservers, the consensus-mongers, the whole flatulent rabble of politicians who, since the end of the Second World War, have seen their task only as managed decline. In other words, Jacob is derided by the mediocratic establishment.

It is easy to see why they despise him. He is not one of them.

He speaks English and writes elegantly while his detractors in politics and the press only babble, more or less ungrammatically, the cliches which they believe the people want to hear.

He tells the truth. For instance the truth that if you reduce taxation you actually produce more revenue for the exchequer.

The political class in the parliamentary parties and in the press would have us believe that money belongs to the government and that policy is the business of politicians as they decide how much money they will allocate to the docile population. Rees-Mogg speaks the truth plainly when he says: “The government doesn’t have any money of its own. It has only that which it extracts from the public through taxation.”

And he adds, “The public sector doesn’t generate any money at all, but only recycles that made available to it by the private sector.”

And Jacob actually knows something worth knowing. He has what Denis Healey  described as a “hinterland.” He is a classicist and a music lover. Compare and contrast with such as David Cameron who prefers to hang out with the head-bangers at pop festivals. Or Peter Mandelson and Gideon Osborne who once liked to be seen with Russian oligarchs on their yachts.

He has a sense of humour – not to be confused with the witless gurgling of politicians trying to tell a joke and the posturing belly-laughs of their hearers..

Jacob has an acute and informed political sensibility derived from his reading of history, the Greek philosophers and the Roman poets. What do his detractors know? The best of them know only management studies and the worst of them the positivistic claptrap of PPE. These people are monochrome political wonks. What does he know of politics, who only politics knows?

Almost worst of all – I’m saving the absolute worst of all for the end – Jacob is a traditional family man and attends the Catholic Mass in Latin. And there is conspicuous hostility to both those persuasions on the part of the politically-correct diversity-mongers and equality-salesmen in the the administrative class

So what, according to his uncultured despisers, is Jacob’s worst fault?

Why, he is a traditional Tory of course. That is, as the fatuous Mrs May, remarked of “the nasty party.”

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08 Aug

God gets it right at his second attempt

God got it wrong first time round and was told to try again.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office funds an institution called Wilton Park which has just published a report Opportunities and Challenges: the Intersection of of Faith and Human Rights of LGBT+  Persons

“Evangelical Christians in the Global South – mainly Africa – should be expected to re-interpret the Bible to make it compatible with LGBT+ ideology.”

This agency, supported by the British Government demands “direct action” and says, “Religious leaders should be held to account for their promotion of hatred against LGBT+ people. Queer lawyers and their allies are well-placed to challenge hate speech through administrative law and litigation.”

The churches must be obliged to provide “enlightened textual exegesis.” There should also be “…teaching of LGBT+ in Sunday schools and Queer theology in colleges training people for the church’s ministry.”

The report denounces missionaries and Christian teachers for “spreading prejudiced views”

The Wilton Park report calls for “the improvement” of the Bible, particularly of accounts of “Sodom and Gomorrah which perpetuate hatred.”

I quite agree. I have spent my life as a theologian and I confess that for all those years I took the Bible to be the Word of God. But, following my enlightenment by my LGBT+ friends and by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, I now see that the Bible is a wretched travesty, a primitive and pernicious denunciation of homosexual behaviour which, thankfully, our enlightened and emancipated understanding reveals to be one of the greatest blessings received in the whole history of the human race. Not only do I approve, therefore, of the rewriting of biblical texts to demonstrate God’s Original Error and to prove what a holy and blessed thing homosexual behaviour is, but I shall make my own contribution to this new vision by offering a fresh translation of the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

“ And it came to pass that the Lord did look down upon the cities of the plain, even upon Sodom wherein dwelt the shirt-lifters and upon the whole company of them that did bat for the other side  which wast called Gomorrah. And the Lord repenteth of the wrath that wast aforetime kindled in his heart against them and all their doings which (in the days wherein God erred) he declared were abominations. And behold, the Lord said, ‘I will no more cause mine anger to be poured out upon them, neither will I destroy them in my judgement. And I will cause their works, even unto their shirt-lifting and their batting for the other side withal, to be blessed and to be honoured among all men…and women and among them that wist not what manner of creature they be.’

“So the Lord set his pink ribbon in the heavens as an everlasting sign that he would no more wax wroth against them that were in the olden time called an abomination but which are from henceforth to be called them in whom the Lord delighteth. And lo the Lord spake unto them and said, ‘I will give unto every man and woman and unto them which wist not what manner of creature they be boxed sets innumerable of Judy Garland movies and The Lamentations of Stephen Fry even unto every one of them in his/her/their own cottage.’

“And they all arose and with one accord said, ‘How come we shirt-lifters, brown-hatters and them that do bat for the other side to hear in our own polari the wonderful works of Stephen Fry?’

“And behold, the pillar of salt which aforetime wast Lot’s wife (Let him that readeth understand) wast turned into Judy Garland. So the multitude of them lift up their voices and sang Candle in the Wind.

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05 Aug

Children of the Revolution

Our children and grandchildren will put Jeremy Corbyn into Number Ten.

They will do this because, while their parents and grandparents belong to the nasty  generation, the youngsters are the nice generation. They believe Corbyn.stands for  a future that will be kind, gentle and generous – in a word a nice future.

As a paid up nasty, I tell them that Corbyn is an extreme socialist demagogue, that socialism has never worked anywhere and that, when it is practised thoroughly as Corbyn intends, it will impoverish the people and compromise their liberty.

The nice young people tell me I’m only saying this because I’m nasty.

They complain about “austerity” and “the cuts.” Nastily, but truly, I tell them there have been no cuts and the country is spending and borrowing more billions now than it was five years ago, more in fact than it has ever spent and borrowed

They youngsters say that such truths as this are simply part of being nasty and that we ought to look for alternative truths, their truths, nice truths.

I say, “But that just means you’ve lost the meaning of “truth.”

“You’re just being bigoted and nasty again, granddad!”

I tell them that Corbyn is an IRA sympathiser, that he invited members of this terrorist group to the House of Commons only weeks after they tried to murder the British cabinet in the Brighton bomb. I tell them that Corbyn refers to the terrorists Hamas and Hezbollah as “our friends.”

They tell me not to say such nasty things.

I tell them that Corbyn is an admirer of Chavez and Maduro, that he agrees with their economic, social and political policies and he wants to see more of their sort of socialism in our country. I add that people in Venezuela are scavenging  dustbins for food, that the country is the most murderous in the world, that there is imprisonment without trial, torture and the kidnapping and illegal incarceration of the political opposition.

The youngsters reply, “Why do you say such nasty things?”

“Because they happen to be true.”

“True for you, perhaps, granddad, but not for us. For your truth is different from our truth. Because you are nasty but we are nice.”

Then the youngsters recite all the nice things which are now features of their lives but were not available in the nasty old days, granddad’s days: “We have safe spaces in all our universities, so we’re not exposed to the ideas and opinions of speakers who offend us.”

I  say, “But I thought the purpose of a university was to teach critical thinking – a place where ideas of all sorts are exposed and examined: in other words, an intelligent space which upholds the principle of free speech.”

They rebuke me: ”But we don’t want the sort of free speech which says all these offensive and nasty things!”

“Why do you want to pull down statues of the celebrated men and women of the nation’s past?”

“Because they had nasty ideas. They were empire-builders. They weren’t feminists. They didn’t support LGBT equality.”

“So you want to expunge their memory from the public realm, to make them non-persons as the Soviets used to do to those who had fallen from favour. You want to rewrite history.”

“Yes, because some of this history we find offensive and nasty, and we don’t want to have to hear about it.”

“But those who don’t understand the past will be compelled to repeat its mistakes.”

“No we won’t: because they were nasty people and we are nice people.”

“Why did you vote – two or three times in some cases – to remain in the EU and be governed by an unelected commissariat over which you have no democratic control?”

“Because the EU is such a nice idea.”

Finally, it’s the turn of the nice young people to ask me a question: “Why do you think we believe all the nice things we do believe?”

I am obliged to admit: “It’s my fault, that and the fault of my generation. For fifty years we have ensured that youngsters become sentimentalised and infantilised through a lousy system of state education.  Consequently you can’t think straight and so you’re at the mercy of all the propagandising and social engineering of Britain’s institutional leftism. I admit I am of the nasty generation and quite the nastiest thing we ever did was to inflict this sort of schooling on all you nice young people.”

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03 Aug

The Sex Olympics

A new plague is stalking the land. It’s not the black death and it’s not cholera, but much more serious than either of these. I know it’s serious because it was the first item on the SKY News website this morning. It’s called binge viewing and it’s destroying the sleep and, says SKY, the lives of those afflicted.

Sadly, this virulent plague chiefly affects people described as “vulnerable”: that is the hordes of intellectually challenged, morally depraved and aesthetically numb who sit up all night watching tawdry shows such as Game of Thrones. Binge viewing, we were informed, is “a syndrome,” so victims who are made to suffer by Game of Thrones are very likely to have their sorry condition aggravated by the fact that they are also addicted to Strictly Come Dancing or Britain’s Got Talent or that top of the range nuts ‘n’ sluts show Say Yes to the Dress in which very fat women – both black and white, so there’s nothing racist about this – giggle and squeal as they try on ludicrously expensive wedding gowns which are then paid for by their fathers.

Back in the 1960s there was a remarkable and at the time shocking television play called The Sex Olympics. The premise was that there would come a time when, under a totalitarian government, millions would gawp endlessly at actors fornicating on screen. This fantasy has now been realised and it’s called Love Island.   

I recall a telling remark by C.H. Sisson: “What makes St Augustine so interesting is that he lived through times very much like ours – and rejected them.”

Indeed, Augustine describes a state in which people are, “…unconcerned about the utter corruption of their country – ‘So long as it lasts’ they say – so long as it enjoys material prosperity.” The downfall of the Roman Empire was preceded by a whole series of financial crises. It was overwhelmed by mass immigration and threatened by barbarian violence. The comparisons with our own time are very striking. Augustine prophesied against “…rulers who are interested not in the morality, but the docility of their subjects; they are regarded not as directors of conduct but as controllers of material things and providers of material satisfaction.”

Doesn’t that make you think of extravagant loans to people who could never afford them; of laws to encourage 24/7 shopping and 24/7 boozing; of the whole world turned into advertisements? Art and culture debased, as Sir Peter Maxwell Davies once remarked of a Damien Hirst exhibition, “…into manufactured artefacts without content, with just a brand tag supposed to guarantee market value.”

A civilisation cannot survive on such debased conduct, on pretend values which are really valueless.

Augustine describes a society where: “Full publicity is given where shame would be appropriate; close secrecy is imposed where praise would be in order. Decency is veiled from sight; indecency is exposed to view. Scenes of evil attract packed audiences; good words scarcely find any listeners. It is as if purity should provoke a blush and corruption give grounds for pride.”

Here we are again on the eve of destruction. Pizza and porn are today’s bread and circuses. Binge viewers everywhere, sit back and enjoy the Sex Olympics.

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02 Aug

Well, well Welby

There are varieties of fatuity – and then we come to Archbishop Justin Welby.

Yet again this week he offered to the nation the benefit of his boundless wisdom and called for a cross-party commission to negotiate Britain’s departure from the European Union. He said major decisions should be “taken off the political table.”

Even someone with less perspicuity than Welby – always supposing such a person could be found outside Bishopthorpe Palace – would understand that Brexit and the whole business of Britain’s negotiations with the EU are political  issues and so it is nonsense to suggest that they be removed from the political realm.

We might as well suggest that when Welby sits down with his fellow bishops to discuss, say, a fresh translation of The Athanasian Creed, the matter should be “taken off the theological table.”

Besides, when Welby wades in as he has with his dazzling moral superiority on full beam, you would think that even he would understand that such an intervention is itself a political act. Thus incoherently he uses a political statement to declare that the matter should not be political.

The Archbishop’s first language is gibberish

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Can the politicians not put at the front of their minds the needs of the United Kingdom to come out with a functional, working system for Brexit, and agree that certain things are, as it were, off the political table and will be decided separately in an expert commission, or commission of senior politicians led by someone that (sic) is trusted in the political world?”

Welby would benefit from reading the well-known primer for infants and juniors Janet and John Look at Polity. For the decision to leave the EU was a political choice made by the British electorate. What we did in the referendum of 2016 was to express our will and then hand the matter over to the politicians whose job it is to work out the details

He wants “an expert commission” or “a commission of senior politicians led by someone that (sic again) is trusted in the political world.”

Does such a paragon exist?

What he really wants is a nanny – someone who knows best.

I wonder that Welby hasn’t noticed that Brexit is a divisive issue and a sizeable minority of the electorate voted against it. Any “expert commission” would of course itself be contentious from its appointment, with one side claiming it to be independent and the other side accusing it of bias

Crying for nanny is of course a characteristic of the infantile mind.

Like weak men everywhere, Welby has a craving for authority, for someone to tell him what to think and what to do. Plato would have provided him with such figures. Plato called them Guardians which the Latin philosophers translated as Custodes.

And they immediately asked the question, Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?

Who Will Guard the Guardians?

Round of applause, please everyone. Let’s hear it for the Archbishop of Cant.

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