The Christmas Story

The whole point of Christmas for our family is the celebration of the birth of Christ. The highlight will be a joyful celebration in Church on Christmas Day with great music and much thanksgiving. It will also, by popular family demand and precedent, be a very English affair, incorporating the best of the pagan midwinter traditions of feasting, holly and mistletoe, with the imported Germanic tradition (God bless Queen Victoria!) of an old-fashioned fir tree, decorations, needles and all.

Will you shop ‘til you drop?
Of course, we will not be immune from the modern excesses of retail therapy and consumerism. Nor will we forget those not celebrating much this Christmas for whatever misfortune or circumstance, in Salisbury or around the world. We will especially remember the courageous men and women of HM Forces away on active service and so much missed by their loved ones in Wiltshire.

There’s plenty of bad news about. But the best news for a long time is that I really believe society is fighting back against the ‘official’ lunacy of political correctness. Were you as delighted as I was to see two recent newspaper headlines denouncing the efforts of secularists to push religion to the margins of public life?

Politics gone mad
‘Archbishop wages Winterval war on creeping atheism’ reported that the Archbishop of York had rubbished Birmingham City Council for trying to rename Christmas itself, and Plymouth for ending free parking on Sundays in case it upset other religions (oops – just like Salisbury!). ‘Leave Christmas alone, say Muslims’ was even starker, recording Muslim leaders who said Councils were playing into the hands of extremists who were able to blame Muslim communities for undermining Britain’s Christian culture.

The four nations of our United Kingdom, along with all other Western Democracies, are founded on Christian tradition, culture and heritage. In most of those countries the state is secular. That is also true of many Muslim nations – such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia an Egypt. A few are theocracies – like Iran. In the UK, Henry VIII did not break with Rome and establish the Church of England only to resolve his marital problems – they were the last straw. Elizabeth I achieved a lasting constitutional settlement that met the expectations of the reformed Church and of the state and reflected the ancient relations between the two powers in the kingdom.

Church and state
Over the years national and local government have taken over many of the functions originally run by churches in each parish. However, the Church of England continues to have a presence and an influence in every parish in the land – often through the village school. In the House of Commons, the joint Ecclesiastical Committee of both Houses, of which I am a member, considers proposed legislation from the Church of England and decides whether or not to recommend it to Parliament. The Bishop of Salisbury speaks – and votes - in the House of Lords. That is the established Church in action and I think it is a very good thing.

Next year the current Prime Minister will step down. I acknowledge the good things he and his Government have done. I regret very much their misjudgements and follies which have led to the greatest and swiftest erosion of our English traditions of liberty and the rule of law for a very long time. As his successor takes over I see no sign of this trend abating.

Security or control?
Identity theft is bad enough – but official surveillance by government and its agencies is intolerable. Our mobile phones, e-mails, bank accounts – even our private car movements – are monitored. You and I can be arrested and extradited by a foreign government without our courts considering evidence of alleged offences committed abroad. That is a basic breach of human rights that Magna Carta guaranteed. In the recent Queen’s Speech the Government announced yet more restrictive legislation – and will probably try again to permit the state to lock us away for 90 days without charge. Meanwhile this Government’s Human Rights Act forces the Home Secretary to pay compensation to convicted prisoners deprived of their illegal drugs - in prison - and illegal immigrants cannot be deported. Soon law-abiding citizens must have identity cards. This cannot all be laid at the feet of the war on terror.

Shared values
So what has gone wrong? What must be put right? The answer to all crime is not more legislation. Having used words that to most of us were odious and unacceptable the Leader of the BNP was acquitted of any legal offence by twelve good men and true. The immediate reaction of our next PM was to call for a change in the law. Wrong. We need to reassert our traditional value systems and our attitudes to personal responsibility and citizenship that this government has done so much to erode. Whether we are talking about freedom of speech, privacy, the importance of families or hunting, the English (British even) have got it about right in 2000 years or so. Much of that is down to the relationship between and the moral values shared by the Church of England and our nation state.

Christians are confident and it is not our way to denigrate or threaten anyone else’s religion (or lack of it). But in a Christian country with a constitution like ours, worked out after so long by free and diverse people, to deny the values that have our made our nation what it is today, is a very great folly and a huge political error. The current Governing Party is not just incompetent – they have lost the plot.

I wish you all a very Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year – for all the right reasons.

Robert Key MP
Salisbury, 15th November 2006