ONCE in UNREAL DAVID's (BIG) SOCIETY

The Prime Minister has declared Britain “a Christian country … and we should not be afraid to say so”. It’s not unusual, of course, for politicians to make assertions that have no basis in fact. Sometimes this is done out of ignorance, sometimes out of dishonesty, sometimes out of self-denial, sometimes out of malice, sometimes out of hubris, sometimes out of simple foolishness. It’s hard to know which – if not all – of these is the wellspring of Cameron’s announcement. But, whichever way you cut it, it is not true.

In the most recently published results of the British Social Attitudes survey, those accounting themselves as Church of England were below twenty percent. Non-denominational Christians were under ten percent and Catholics less than nine percent. Those who said they had no religion of any kind numbered a little over fifty percent. In other words, Britain is not even half a Christian country. Indeed, considerably more people are certainly not Christian than voted for the parties comprising the coalition government. For whom does Cameron believe he is speaking?

Cameron's Christmas cards don't do religion: this was last year's, emphasising his parental orientation

Given that he must know – his advisors anyway must have pointed out – that his claim would likely alienate and repel rather more listeners than it would please (and besides, those pleased would be overwhelmingly dominated by those whose support is already assured), what did he think he was up to? Can he have been fending off in a subterranean way those filthy foreigners in the non-C-of-E European Union: Catholic France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Poland and Ireland, Lutheran-Calvinist Germany? Could it have been a low piece of point-scoring against the Jewish Ed Miliband? Was it a crude attempt to identify himself with the spirit of Christmas? If this latter, he’d have done better by volunteering to switch on the lights in Oxford Street or accepting a cameo in the Christmas Day editions of either Downton Abbey or Absolutely Fabulous. The seasonal worship indulged by the vast majority of the British electorate is of those great gods, Retail and Telly.

The obvious question arising from Cameron’s asseveration is: does this supposedly Christian nation have a Christian government? Well, let’s just consider how far it measures up to the more obvious of Christ’s teachings and tenets. To begin at the beginning: “I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” [Matthew 19:24]. Two-thirds of the Cabinet are millionaires, several of them (including Cameron) multi-millionaires. So ministers – all of them, it’s fair to say, because even the non-millionaires are rich by most people’s standards – are booked for eternal damnation; which rather reduces their credentials as Christians, wouldn’t you say?

On the subject of damnation, Matthew has another pertinent passage for this government: “Then shall [God] say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:/For I was an hungred [i.e. hungry], and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:/I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not:/Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger,or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?/Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me” [Matthew 25:41-5].

You notice how Christ does not suggest that we are all in it together or that helping the deprived is too expensive because of the “mess” that God inherited or that there needs to be a “stranger” quota, at least among those from outside the European Union. It is a given that the “least” must be “ministered” to. Neither does Christ suggest that the top rate of tax ought to be lowered. The government clearly does not subscribe to the philosophy as expressed here in Matthew’s account.

The government’s constant harping on eliminating the deficit puts it on the side of the Pharisees whom Christ excoriated: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone./Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel” [Matthew 23:23-4].

Nor did Cameron bear in mind, when he exercised the summit veto the other week, another dictum of Christ’s quoted by Matthew: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” [Matthew 19:19]. Nowhere do the gospels suggest that Christ advocated putting the British interest first. Funny, that.

This year's secular card manages to smuggle in very ostentatiously a touch of flag-waving

Of course, one can make a case for pretty much anything, however perverse or unchristian, with selected quotes from scripture. But these I have cited are widely-known and understood, even among those like me who find no place in their lives for supernatural mumbo-jumbo. It seems to me that those who publicly profess their conviction ought to act in a way that does not readily undermine the credibility of those convictions.

In sum, Britain is by no stretch of the imagination a Christian country. And nor does it labour under a Christian government. I wish all my readers a very cool Yule.

WHITE EARTH, WHITE TERROR

The bloody end of Eugene Terre’Blanche can’t have taken many by surprise, certainly not the followers of Christ who know their man’s words as spoken to Saint Peter and reported in the Matthew Gospel: “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” [26:52]. Terre’Blanche certainly took the sword. The son of an officer in the South African Defence Force, a conscription outfit not noted for its progressive implementation of apartheid rule, he joined the South African Police. He rose to become a warrant officer in the Special Guard that protected government ministers. However, he came to feel that the policies of Prime Minister John Vorster were too liberal – ha! – and resigned to join the right-wing break-away movement, the Herstigte Nasionale Party.


In his attractive youth in the South African Police

When he failed to find elective office by this route, he formed his own grouping, the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (known as the AWB), a quasi-military pressure group that he would lead for 37 years. He chose as his group’s symbol a variation on the swastika, donned his bodyguards in black shirts and was always referred to as The Leader (Der Leier in Afrikaans, the precise equivalent of Der Führer). But the AWB was a tuppeny-ha’penny outfit by the standards of most militias. Even the sainted Ken Sara-Wiwa maintained a private army capable of more efficient despatch of renegades and apostates than were the AWB. Though (following the inaugural tarring and feathering of a white liberal academic) his goons were certainly responsible for some deaths in South Africa, Terre’Blanche customarily traded more in menace and bloodcurdling speeches than in systematic violence against perceived enemies of apartheid or civil disobedience in the face of what he claimed was the weakening of white supremacy successively by Vorster and PW Botha.


With fellow AWB stormtroopers

Perhaps Terre’Blanche’s most eye-catching stroke was the 1993 attack he and several hundred supremacists launched on the building where negotiations were in progress to end apartheid and introduce multi-racial elections. Having successfully disrupted the talks, however, the storm-troopers ran out of ideas as to what to do beyond pissing on the floor and painting slogans on the walls. They left with a promise of no legal repercussions and the multi-racial elections went ahead as planned, thereby electing Nelson Mandela as president.

Nick Broomfield’s celebrated 1991 documentary portrait for Channel 4, The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife, presented a man who worked hard at seeming ferocious but who had little coherent to offer in terms of philosophy or practical politics. This of course is the shortcoming of fundamentalists everywhere. “No surrender” is their cry and armed is their response. We can see this breaking out right across the States just now and truly unnerving it is too. Those barking defiance from the last redoubt are generally absurd creatures and Terre’Blanche played out the absurdity in full measure, strutting around like a Mussolini of the veldt and famously falling off his horse at a parade intended to burnish his legend.


AWB design style

It is the armed ingredient that stops these people existing only in a world of comic operetta. Last week, a middle-aged so-called “born again Christian” and “pro-lifer” was sentenced to fifty years in a Kansas jail for shooting dead a surgeon outside a church. The killer justified his action by calling the surgeon “a baby-killer”. It is the taking of the law into their own hands that is the logical outcome of the decision to bear arms. Just as the regulatory instincts of left-of-centre regimes can, when taken to extremes, turn into oppression so the “freedom” demanded by right-wingers soon gives way to anarchy and the law of the jungle. In that world, weapons are carried for “defence” but of course are used in practice for attack.


Menace and blood-curdling speeches

I do not doubt that there is lawlessness and vengefulness among both black and white communities in South Africa. White farmers clearly do get attacked – murdered, even – simply because they own land. It’s frighteningly easy to imagine a future government in Pretoria instigating a self-defeating campaign to drive the whites from successful farms as Mugabe has done in Zimbabwe with the same result that does no one, black or white, any good.

Equally, the poverty and resentment among poor urban and rural blacks is real and crippling enough. How they must wonder when the bright promise of Mandela is going to transform their little lives. That Terre’Blanche was hacked to death with pangas by young men whom he had cheated of their recompense for labour undertaken seems only too likely, both in terms of his indifference to their entitlement and their resorting to the only remedy they knew. If the murderous cruelties of the years of apartheid are revisited upon those whites who perpetrated them, it is hardly a surprise. Read the novels of the great Nobel laureate JM Coetzee who, with understandable discretion, has uprooted his family and moved to Australia. Among his works, Disgrace, In the Heart of the Country and Life and Times of Michael K provide as compelling a portrait as any of life for both black and white in South Africa.


Careful, Gene, you might fall off

Jacob Zuma – himself a figure of doubtful credibility with his wives, his enthusiasm for public dancing and his constant air of corruption – has a real challenge to keep this show on the road if he does not want his presidency to be remembered primarily for a Football World Cup marked by violence and crime. He has been shrewdly solicitous about the Terre’Blanche murder. He knows that the danger of a backlash is real and frightening and that he must contain it. The dead fool should be soon forgotten and, we must hope, will leave no movement or legacy that can last. But this is a moment to hold our collective breath.


Zapiro cartoon for The Jo'burg Mail & Guardian a year ago: not quite how it turned out

************************************

A most melancholy task that falls to us at this time of year is the removal of dead frogs from our pond. Evidently the females are exhausted and eventually drowned by the over-amorous males, some of whom are found to be still clinging to the corpses when they are netted out. On the night-time walks, I keep the dogs on tight leads and rake the ground with torches to ensure that we step on none of the creatures lurking and croaking to each other in the grass. But the reward of this care is the daytime dumping of bloated bodies over the hedge, as many as six or eight some days. It seems a very unproductive means of courtship. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be done another year to ameliorate this carnage?

The WOMAN TAKEN in ADULTERY

There is no sanctimonious little twerp anywhere in these islands more deserving of a come-uppance than Peter Robinson. The former estate agent became First Minister of the Northern Ireland assembly some eighteen months ago in succession to his mentor, Dr Ian Paisley. He also sits in the Commons where he is the longest-serving Belfast MP (31 years) in the history of the province. His wife Iris, to whom he has been married for rising 40 years, is also a member both at Stormont and Westminster. They like to be known as “the first couple” in Belfast, but in London they are more often referred to – due to the extravagance of their expenses claims, their combined income from various sources (above half a million per year) and their ostentatious expenditure – as “the Swish Family Robinson”.

"It's a little secret, just the Robinsons' affair" [Paul Simon]: Just after Christmas, Iris Robinson announced that she was withdrawing from public life “for mental health reasons”. Last Wednesday, aware that a BBC Northern Ireland current affairs reporter and producer knew a good deal about the circumstances of her withdrawal, she issued an emotional statement, admitting to an extramarital affair that she blamed on her mental state. She had, she declared, tried to take her own life back in March. Ahead of the broadcast of the programme (in Northern Ireland on Friday evening; available throughout the UK on BBC iPlayer until next Friday), the notion was put about that Mrs Robinson’s lover had been “a local businessman”.



Iris Robinson not (I think) from her own campaign literature

Thereafter, Iris Robinson went to ground, or was put to ground. The Sunday Times reports her holed up in the French ski resort of Chamonix where, interestingly, Elin Nordegren repaired in face of the unfolding publicity about the affairs of her husband, Tiger Woods. Peter Robinson now took control of the story, decided to play it as if all were open and above board and invited the BBC’s camera and other selected reporters to his study where, dressed in studiedly casual clothes (the kind an estate agent would affect), he unburdened himself of his own statement.

The pearl at its centre is this passage: “I love my wife. I have always been faithful to her. In a spirit of humility and repentance, Iris sought my forgiveness, she took responsibility upon herself alone for her actions and I have forgiven her. More important, I know she has sought and received god’s forgiveness. I only ask, if people feel they must judge her, that they find within themselves, as I have done, the gift of doing so with mercy and compassion”.



The Elin Nordegren of Stormont

"Jesus loves you more than you will know" [Simon}: That the almighty turns out to be liberal on adultery is clearly to the enormous advantage of the Robinsons. What has been historically a bull point for the Unionists in the perceived wisdom of said almighty is that he is reliably supportive of moral superiority. Moral superiority has ever been the central plank of Unionism in Ireland, politically as well as spiritually. Peter Robinson, as may be detected in his statement, is so in thrall to moral superiority that, even in her agony, he cannot forebear publicly to score moral points off his wife (“I have always been faithful to her”) as well as off everyone else (“I only ask … people … [to] find within themselves, as I have done … mercy and compassion”). As I say, a sanctimonious little twerp.

Darragh MacIntyre’s report for Spotlight, produced by Mary McKeagney, appears to pull no punches. What Peter Robinson called “Iris’s inappropriate relationship” was with someone who only became anything resembling “a local businessman” as a result of Mrs Robinson’s connections. He is Kirk McCambley, the son of Iris’s butcher, a boy she had known since he was nine. In 2008, Bill the butcher died and Iris took Kirk under her wing; there is no mention in the story of Kirk’s mother. They became lovers. Iris was 59, Kirk 19, so she was well old enough to be his grandmother.



Local businessman, aged 19

The Bible story of the woman taken in adultery is the source of Christ’s admonition “let him who is without sin cast the first stone” and we shall occupy no moral high ground concerning the sexual aspects of this story, save in this regard. Iris Robinson, rather inconveniently for her present circumstances, has been most widely known until the present shemozzl for a thoroughly unforgiving stance on the sexual morality of others. On the very morning that her husband was succeeding to the post of first minister, Mrs Robinson was telling BBC Radio Ulster that homosexuality was “an abomination”. She advocated that gay people should seek a cure for their condition. On another occasion, she told BBC Radio 5: “I have a very lovely psychiatrist who works with me in my offices and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals, trying to turn away from what they are engaged in”. In the Commons, she announced that “there can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing children”. It would be instructive to know whether Mrs Robinson’s “very lovely psychiatrist” has been able to winkle out at what age, between nine and 19, the butcher’s boy first became sexually alluring to her.

"Coo, coo, ca-choo, Mrs Robinson" [Simon]: Iris Robinson is a born-again Christian, unlike her husband who is a life-long evangelical, but as we know it is frequently the converts who become, metaphorically or otherwise, the suicide bombers. Iris’s deployment of the term “abomination” in describing gay people has its origin, as you might guess, in The Bible, specifically Leviticus 20:13: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them”. Most unfortunately for the sainted Iris, we find this in Leviticus just three verses earlier: “And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death”.


Peter Robinson tries out an AK-47, Israel 1986

Such death is not sanctioned by scripture if it is administered by one’s own hand. Here is the First Book of Corinthians 6:19: “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body”. In other words, Iris, suicide isn’t smiled on much in the scriptures either.

On the morning of the night in March when Mrs Robinson attempted to do away with herself with an overdose, Mr Robinson ascertained that she was conscious, phoned her aide, Selwyn Black, and then left for Stormont. She was hence alone until Black and paramedics arrived, the latter determining that she ought to be hospitalised. While others took care of her, Robinson was making jokes at the despatch box – "Going to the candidates' debates" [Simon]. He rationalised this callous behaviour in his statement thus: “I’ve never allowed my personal life to interfere with my work”. A sanctimonious little twerp, as I say.

"We'd like to know a little bit about you for our files" [Simon]: So far so simple. Now it grows murkier, as these things will. Using her political power, Iris solicited £50,000 start-up capital from two local entrepreneurs, so as to set up young Master McCambley in a restaurant in a fashionable riverside development. McCambley won the contract for the enterprise against some competition, despite having no experience in business or as a restaurateur. Iris Robinson sat on the council that awarded the contract. Having secured his situation, Iris then demanded a ten percent facility fee in cash. In every detail itemised in this paragraph, she was either breaking the law or breaching government regulation or both.



Iris and Peter hear of the sad death of Stephen Gately

Not surprisingly, the relationship with McCambley soon broke down. “Just cut links with Kirk” she texted Black. “God’s word was very clear on it”. You might think it a pity that the almighty didn’t find it within himself to be a bit more upfront at the outset of the relationship. Has he not heard of stable doors and horses bolting? Iris’s reaction was to demand the return of the £45,000, partly to clear her own debts, partly to be donated as conscience money to the church; as it happens, in this case, to the church run by her sister-in-law. The church never received any payment. At this point, the Robinsons were holidaying at their Florida flat so all the arrangements had to be conducted by Selwyn Black who, understandably, began to object that, as a former RAF chaplain, he didn’t think that looking after an adulterer’s financial affairs fell within his sense of what was proper, let alone his job description.

"Where have you gone, Ken Maginnis, oh?" [after Simon]: Back in Belfast, Iris Robinson began blatantly lobbying for contracts on behalf of the surviving creditor who had bankrolled McCambley’s business. It was at around this point that Peter Robinson became involved (and she attempted suicide). Discovering that his wife was misusing funds, contacts and contracts, he ought to have made a full breast of it to the committee overseeing propriety or otherwise in ministerial dealings. But he did not. “They both knew the consequences of what they had been involved in,” Black told Spotlight at the programme’s conclusion, “and did nothing to address that circumstance. It goes right to the heart of credibility in Northern Ireland”.



Marilyn (aka Peter Robinson but perhaps a different one)

At least one section of the community is having a deserved good laugh at the expense of the Robinsons. A correspondent wrote to The Guardian on Friday: “May I be the first homosexual to genuinely wish Iris Robinson MP a complete and swift recovery?” And the gay monthly magazine Attitude, in a spirit of merry satire, has invited Kirk McCambley to pose as its next cover pin-up.

"Ev'ry way you look at it, you lose" [Simon]: In sum, this lurid affair pans out as a curious mirror image of the Tiger Woods scandal, this time with the wife dallying with the parochially Irish equivalent of a nightclub hostess and the husband playing the martyred, wronged but vindictive partner, so it is poetic that Mrs Woods and Mrs Robinson should flee to the same glamorous refuge. So far, Elin Nordegren has emerged in rather better shape than Peter Robinson whose political future is very much in the balance. Whether, with its tradition of moral superiority, the Democratic Unionist Party will continue to support him must be in doubt. Perhaps they will say to him, as they have already said to his wife, what Christ said to the woman taken in adultery: “go, and sin no more”.