Comment: national decay

By Richard North - March 29, 2024

On the holiest day of the year, according to Christian calendar, illuminated signs celebrating the Muslim fasting period of Ramadan are festooning Oxford Street, the premier shopping street of London and hence the UK.

They will remain there over the Easter weekend, having been switched on earlier this month by the Muslim mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. And whether intentional or not, they stand to mock the Christian tradition of the nation, symbolising the fall of the capital to an alien religion.

Were this but one sign of the decay of this proud nation, it would be bad enough. But there are so many symbolic issues across a wide range of subjects that one can only feel a profound sense of gloom in what is the run-up to a supposed festive period of renewal.

One of the many other jarring notes which caught my attention was an article in The Times headed “Church tribunal clears clergyman who called trans archdeacon ‘a bloke’”, but before even considering the detail of the report, this highlights the fact that the Church of England has appointed a man pretending to be a woman as an archdeacon.

One small ray of hope comes with the story, as it concerns a former Anglican priest, Brett Murphy, who refused take this travesty at face value and continued to call this thing, which had named itself Rachell Mann, a “bloke”. He commented on his YouTube channel that Mann was “in fact, biologically, a bloke, who identifies and lives as a woman”. He also (correctly) described him as a “fella”.

It says something for the depths of degradation to which the Church of England has sunk that these biologically accurate statements were referred to the official clergy disciplinary procedures, although one can record that the Church has not quite hit rock bottom as the complaint was dismissed, with the president of the Church’s disciplinary tribunal saying that Murphy has “no case to answer”.

However, in its determination to plumb the very dregs, it seems – according to Murphy – that Mann is being “positioned” by the Church to become the first transsexual bishop, thereby completing the process of debasing the very idea of priesthood.

What is equally sinister is that the Christian Legal Centre, which represented Murphy at the tribunal, says that it was dealing with “a huge volume of cases involving clergy who have been intimidated and punished simply for expressing standard Christian beliefs on marriage and sexual ethics”.

It can only be a matter of time, one supposes, before rebel priests are drummed out of the Church for the grievous sin of practicing the Christian faith and upholding its values – something which, perhaps, is closer than many people realise.

Sadly, it is not only the Church and matters religious which are decaying before our very eyes, witness the surprise award of Easter-time honours  by this tawdry government, with one prominent recipient named  as Mohamed Mansour, apparently on the direct recommendation of prime minister Sunak.

Awarded a knighthood, the official reason this honour has been bestowed is cited as “business, charity and political service”. But it cannot be a coincidence that this Egyptian-born billionaire has also donated £5 million to the Conservative Party.

So blatant is this that even the Telegraph has noticed, having Sunak accused of “obscene cronyism”, and so bad is the situation that one can even find merit in the words of Anneliese Dodds, the Labour chair.

She says of Sunak: “This is either the arrogant act of an entitled man who’s stopped caring what the public thinks, or the demob-happy self-indulgence of someone who doesn’t expect to be prime minister much longer. Either way, it shows a blatant disrespect for the office he should feel privileged to hold”.

This is from a party which has its own skeletons in a bulging cupboard – with deputy leader Rayner very much in the frame – so it amounts to a stroke of near-genius that Sunak has given it the opportunity to sound halfway reasonable.

It isn’t only from politics, though, that we detect the all-pervasive odour of corruption. Prominent in the papers today is the latest instalment of the ongoing Post Office Horizon scandal, with revelations from a hitherto secret report which beggar belief.

According to The Times, one of the many media organs to carry the story, the Post Office spent more than £90 million fighting sub-postmasters in the High Court despite knowing its defence was untrue, thus denying that losses in Post Office branches could be inserted without postmasters’ knowledge from hundreds of miles away, or by “malicious” individuals working in IT support centres.

The internal report, named Operation Bramble, which has been published on the Post Office inquiry website, states that staff at Fujitsu, which was responsible for the Horizon software system that caused the problems, were able to edit or delete transactions recorded by branches “in a way that could impact on the branch’s overall accounting position”.

In response to the question “can these generate a shortfall in the branch accounts?”, the report stated that super-users, staff with the correct permissions, “could theoretically cause a shortfall in branch accounts”. However, the Post Office’s defence document, filed with the High Court, said that it was “impossible” for Fujitsu to cause “significant shortfalls” remotely, only acknowledging that a “small number” of people had super-user rights.

This has now gone way beyond the stage where we are dealing with corporate incompetence and low-level venality, elevating what is quite clearly a top-level cover-up into the realms of perjury and a criminal conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

Not a million miles away in terms of a complete absence of moral compass is the Thames Water affair, with the company on the brink of bankruptcy, warning that hard-pressed consumers will have to pick up the bill, to the tune of a 40 percent increase in bills by 2030.

Yet, on the other hand we hear that shareholders have “sucked billions” out of the company, sums that should have been used to fix the infrastructure which consumers will now have to finance.

The details of the story paint an all-too familiar picture of corporate greed, starting when Australian bank Macquarie and a string of offshore pension funds bought Thames in 2006 and controlled the business as a consortium for a decade.

Over that period, they took out about £2.7 billion in dividends using a complex financial structure ultimately underpinned by money paid into Thames Water by bill payers. In one year alone, Thames paid a £656 million dividend – pushing the group into the red.

During the most prolific periods, shareholders sucked out another £1.3 billion between 2010 and 2014 and, in the final year of ownership, the Macquarie-led consortium shared in a further £157 million windfall as debts rose four-fold to £10 billion from £2.3 billion. Currently, net debts stand at around £14 billion.

Such episodes, though, are only the cull from today’s media but there is much, much more in an unremitting tide of gloom. Dinghy-borne illegal immigrants, for instance, have reached a record level for this time of year, with 4,644 having made the crossing in the first three month, compared with the last record of 4,548 for January to March 2022.

Yet, as the Telegraph complains, the asylum system is completely broken, as it points to the way the case of Abdul Ezedi, the Clapham “acid attacker”, was handled.

He had twice been refused asylum by the Home Office and had even been convicted of sex offences. Not only was he allowed to stay when he should have been deported but he was given a third opportunity to apply for asylum. This time he was successful after a judge was persuaded that he had converted to Christianity and would be in danger if he returned home.

But then, there are no indications that the prime minister is taking the issue of immigration at all seriously, hence claims from former immigration minister Robert Jenrick that the prime minister was “completely disinterested in this issue and wouldn’t even discuss it with anybody”, a claim echoed by Braverman.

With the stab-fest still rampant in Sadiq Kahn’s London, we see graphic details of a knife attack on a train travelling to Beckenham, followed in short order by another attack at Kennington Tube station, then to be followed by a Deliveroo driver being attacked in Enfield.

I could go on, but the list is already depressing enough and, as we slide inexorably to third-world status, even the weather has turned against us for the holiday period, as it usually does. At least the sudden snow showers in some areas will quieten the global boiling fraternity for a little while, so we should be thankful for small mercies.