The BNP's black and white ministers' show

My favourite election headline appeared in the Croydon Guardian: ‘BNP “too racist” for black vicar.’ Reverend James Gitau, 63, from West Croydon, joined the BNP and went on the campaign trail on 10 April with Nick Griffin. A pastor with the United Holy Church, Gitau came to Britain in the late 1990s. He issued a press release at Misterseed.com, a website for diaspora Kenyans, in which he declared: ‘BNP is the only party which boldly speaks against sodomy in public . . . condemns use of contraceptives . . . abhors our children’s abortions etc etc . . .’

‘It is true that the old BNP policy was to send all black British citizens back to their original countries, Gitau continued. But he reckoned that ‘the new BNP embraces all races from the minorities’. To prove the point he went campaigning alongside Griffin and another BNP vicar, the party’s Lincoln candidate Reverend Robert West. Like Gitau, West has a thing about gays, branding them ‘dirty and disgusting’ during his election campaign and opposing ‘perv partnerships, which are an abomination in the sight of God and must be ended’.

The Daily Telegraph, reporting on the appearance of this black and white ministers show in Barking and Dagenham, described how West would shout ‘It is not racist to love your country!’ as Gitau stood next to him and ‘Every time the Rev Mr West shouts a slogan, Gitau shouts, “Hallelujah!”’

West’s brand of ‘Christian’ bigotry managed to bring out 1,367 people prepared to vote for him in Lincoln. But the BNP declined to allow Gitau to stand for it in Croydon Central, where it already had a perfectly acceptable white bigot in place in its candidate Cliff Le May. He wrote to London Mayor Boris Johnson telling him to ‘stop ruining our community by stuffing New Addington with violent immigrants who have no right to live among decent civilised white people’ and called the Conservative candidate Gavin Barwell a traitor to his ‘race and nation’ for his party’s immigration policy.

Faced with the likes of Le May, Gitau decided that the BNP was a bit too bigoted even for him. He stood as a Christian Party candidate instead, winning 264 votes – which was still more than 19 of the 41 Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidates managed, by the way.

Council bans Christmas

Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without the familiar seasonal reports of local authority killjoys trying to ‘ban’ it. And like the Christmas displays in the shops, which the laws of commerce now require to be in place before the first leaves fall from the trees, the reports of the bans start earlier every year. This year it was the city of Oxford that was first in the media firing line with the Oxford Mail’s ‘Council set to axe Christmas’ headline on 1 November setting the tone for a spot of ‘political correctness gone mad’-style bureaucrat bashing. The Mail even managed to rope in Sabir Hussain Mirza, chairman of the Muslim Council of Oxford, to lead a chorus of non-Christian, pro-Christmas complaint.

‘This is going to be a disaster. I’m angry and very, very disappointed,’ Mirza moaned. ‘Christmas is special and we shouldn’t ignore it. Christian people should be offended and 99 per cent of people will be against this.’

Against what, exactly? A prohibition on plum puddings and carol singing, a la Oliver Cromwell circa 1649?

Hardly. Instead, it seems the charity Oxford Inspires took the outrageous decision to call this year’s city centre festive lights switch-on a ‘Winter Light Festival’, with the idea of incorporating Hannukah, Diwali and maybe a midwinter solstice bonfire or two. There are still going to be Christmas carols and a Christmas tree and people getting outrageously drunk and shagging each other at office parties and all the other things that make up a traditional Christmas, so it’s hard to see where the axe is falling.

Anyway, as Oxford Inspires spokesman Tei Williams commented, ‘The ceremony takes place on 28 November. It's hardly Christmas if it’s November.’

All aboard the atheist bus

Who’d have thought that a campaign to raise a few thousand pounds to pay for some atheist adverts on London buses would have turned into one of the fundraising success stories of 2008, credit crunch or not?

By 4pm today, the Atheist Bus Campaign had topped its original target of £5,500, set only ten days ago, twenty times over. That’s £109,540.60 raised online, plus £5,500 promised by Richard Dawkins to match what was raised up to the original target, plus £23,750.47 Gift Aid. (Watch out for the scandalised god-followers, who’ll be quick with their complaints that you shouldn’t get Gift Aid on this sort of thing.)

There’s an entertaining few minutes to be had reading through the comments by donors on the campaign's Justgiving page. I was particularly taken by the extra £5 donated by Perry Goldberg ‘for my Catholic work colleague, who is angered by this "childish" appeal. Nah nah nah nah!’

Evensong in Leominster

I went to church while I was out and about this summer. That’s ‘to church’ rather than ‘to a church’, just to be clear about it. I do the latter quite a lot, checking out the architecture, browsing the gravestones. But apart from weddings and funerals I can’t remember the last time I went to a service.

It was evensong, Sunday, late August at St Peter and Paul’s, Leominster. It’s a big church that is almost as wide as it is long by virtue of having two naves. One is plain Norman (round arches, no decoration), the other high gothic (pointed arches, lots of adornment). You can sit in the middle and get an instant history lesson in the development of English church architecture.

It was pouring with rain, as it was almost everywhere this summer, and the roof (sadly neither Norman nor gothic, but a dull restoration) was leaking. The pews are gone and the hundreds of chairs that replaced them were empty. The service was taking place in the far corner, by the altar. Including the vicar and me (and since I sat at the back, I don’t really count), there were seven people present. One of those doubled up as the organist. If any of them were under 60, they’ve aged badly.

I stayed because, well, it seemed rude to leave, it was very wet indeed outside and Leominster really is a very lovely and interesting church. I paid special attention to the sermon to see what it might have to offer this minuscule gathering of the faithful in this place that would once have hosted many hundreds.

The vicar had taken as his lesson Matthew 15:21-28. Matthew relates how Jesus was asked for help by a woman – a Canaanite – whose daughter is possessed by a demon. First, Jesus ignores her. (‘But he answered her not a word’). Then his disciples ask him to get rid of her because she’s making a scene. (‘Send her away; for she crieth after us.’) So Jesus tells her he’s only here to help Jews (‘lost sheep of the house of Israel’). When she persists, he calls her a dog. (‘It is not meet to take the children [of God]’s bread and to cast it to dogs [like you].’) Only when she says that even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table does he finally relent and cure her daughter.

This is one of those disquieting passages from the bible in which people are required to jump through all manner of hoops to demonstrate their subservience before God, or in this case his son, deigns to be nice to them. But the vicar at Leominster made a reasonable stab at turning it into a lesson on our modern-day treatment of minorities, with special reference to Romanies in Italy, asylum seekers in Britain – and a drunk who’d recently tapped him for a couple of quid in his own churchyard.

From what he said, the vicar seemed a decent sort of man, and I don’t suppose there were many places on a wet and windy night in Leominster this summer where you’d have found someone wrestling with moral issues about what to do when a woman from an unpopular minority group starts screaming at you for help in the street. Do you, he asked the elderly few who made up his congregation, a) ignore her; b) tell her to bugger off; c) say you only give to your own kind; or d) call her names?

And, he also asked, if you decide to help her, do you need to be sure that her daughter really is possessed by a demon and she isn’t just spinning you a hard-luck yarn before you do so? Well?

What a c**t eh?

I thought the police must have misread his writing when I saw that a 15-year-old was facing prosecution for his use of the word ‘cult’ on a protest placard. Another word beginning with ‘cu’ and ending with ‘t’ maybe. But not even the numbest of skulls could have thought that calling scientology a cult was beyond the legal pale – could they?

Well, it seems the City of London pointy-heads could – and did. They consfiscated the kid’s placard at a demo outside the scientologists’ spanky-new £24 million HQ near St Paul’s on 10 May and sent a case file to the Crown Prosecution Service.

I’ve no doubt that the CPS will drop the case post-haste. But there are a couple of things that are more than a little disturbing about it ever having got this far.

The first is the CPS’s comment to the Guardian, who broke the story today: ‘In April, prior to this demonstration, as part of our normal working relationship we gave the City of London police general advice on the law around demonstrations and religiously aggravated crime in particular.’

Now we were given firm and repeated assurances when the notion of ‘religiously aggravated crime’ was first introduced to British law by the New Labour government that it would not in any way impact upon our right to freedom of speech, or our ability to criticise particular religious groups or religion in general. In this case it clearly has – and will continue to do so. If referring to Scientology as a ‘cult’ is considered impermissible, what chance is there for anyone wanting to make the case that the Virgin birth may be no more than a ‘fairy tale’ or the Holy Qu’ran an ‘epileptic’s fantasy’?

The second potentially disturbing factor in this case is that it is the City of London police who are involved. This is the same police force that was forced to admit at the end of 2006 that its officers ‘had been accepting invitations, dinners and gifts from the Church of Scientology worth thousands of pounds. Details of how the religious movement appeared to be cultivating officers in the force were revealed in a freedom of information inquiry made by the Guardian.’ And it is the same police force whose chief superintendent, Kevin Hurley, praised the, er, cult (we can discuss the precise meaning of the word in court) for ‘raising the spiritual wealth of society’ at the official opening of its headquarters earlier that year. These facts are, of course, entirely unconnected.

Postscript 23 May 2008: The CPS did indeed drop the case post-haste: 'Our advice is that it is not abusive or insulting and there is no offensiveness, as opposed to criticism, neither in the idea expressed nor in the mode of expression. No action will be taken against the individual.'

'Death was the least she deserved'

It’s difficult to decide what is the most depressing aspect of one of the most depressing stories to come out of post-invasion Iraq. It’s bad enough that Abdel-Qader Ali murdered his 17-year-old daughter, Rand, after she became infatuated with a British soldier in Basra, by choking her with his foot on her throat. It’s worse that when Rand’s mother, Leila Hussein, called on her two sons to stop him, instead they joined in. It’s worse still that the Basra police held Abdel-Qader for barely a couple of hours, during which time they congratulated him for what he had done before letting him go.

‘Death was the least she deserved,’ Abdel-Qader told an Iraqi journalist a couple of weeks later in an interview reported in the Observer on 11 May. ‘I don’t regret it. I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion.’

Perhaps the most depressing of all, however, was what Leila Hussein revealed about the man who killed their child. ‘Even now, I cannot believe my ex-husband was able to kill our daughter,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t a bad person. During our 24 years of marriage, he was never aggressive. But on that day, he was a different person.’

I don’t doubt it, any more than I doubt that the great majority of people who went along with the Nazis, or Stalinism, or slavery, or the Inquisition, weren’t, in essence, ‘bad people’. They were ordinary people led astray by bad ideas. And just as you can’t divorce the actions of Nazis, or Stalinists, or slave traders, or the Inquisition, from the ideologies that underpinned them, neither can you divorce the actions of Abdel-Qader Ali from the ideology that underpinned his killing of his own child. Certainty is the root of all evil – and you don’t get more certain than those who have faith that the hand of the divine can be found in their cruel and wicked deeds.