I see that Davey has begun the attempt to try to use religion as a crutch for his broken, bleeding coalition government. It needs a crutch. After the way they have mismanaged the economy, we will be lucky if Britain doesn't crash and burn like Greece or Iceland before the next election. Top economists all over the world are worriedly watching the UK's stagnating economy that, under labour, was at least showing some signs of life. Now, it seems to be about as dead as Kim Jong-Il, without the added bonus of leaving a legacy of things it has looked at to amuse future generations.Their attacks on the NHS and disability benefits are making more and more people rise up in anger and disgust, and the few voters Cameron managed to woo into voting Tory (let's not forget they only made it into power by the skidmarks in Davey's pants and through Clegg's Betrayal) are reacting in horror at the things this party of overprivileged amateurs are doing to the economy and to the people of this country. Dave should be trying hard to appeal to those few voters, because frankly, trying to bend over backwards to keep The City happy might make him some wealthy billionaire friends, but it won't win him another election.
So, given this immense clusterfuck of a government, no wonder that he is trying a new tactic to win over the British public. let's appeal to people's Christian values, and say that this is a Christian country and that we need to embrace these values in order to halt our slow moral decline.
Did I miss something? Where is this moral decline of which he speaks? Is it in the press, where odious individuals like Kelvin Mackenzie and Paul McMullan think that it is quite acceptable to hack missing children's mobile phones and then point the finger at the paper that uncovered this, claiming that they got the story slightly wrong? Where it is considered that privacy is evil and the only people who want privacy are paedophiles (McMullan's actual words, out of his actual mouth, at the Leveson inquiry)? Or is it in the banks, where a handful of people even now still walk home with millions of pounds after almost destroying the world's economy and being bailed out to the tune of £40 odd billion by the taxpayers? Where their big bosses like bob Diamond say that it's time for the banks to stop apologising now and carry on awarding themselves millions in bonuses like they did before? Or is it in government itself, where the Coalition is forcing genuinely disabled people to look for unsuitable work, and thus thrust them into poverty when they cannot do that work and don't attend an interview and end up with their benefits sanctioned?
Well, good news everyone! Cameron is going to champion Christian values! That means charity - the disabled will get their disability allowance back, people won't be forced to work for their meagre benefits, thousands of families won't lose their tax credits, overpaid MPs with private wealth in the millions of pounds (like most of the cabinet) will start paying their own mortgages instead of getting the taxpayer to pay for them, the NHS won't be broken up and privatised in order to, Scrooge-like, make a profit out of people's suffering and illness, and Gideon will start donating some of his trust fund to the poor. Then comes goodwill to all; the government will crack down on the press who distort, misrepresent and blatantly lie in order to create sensationalist stories (who can forget Jan Moir's unfounded bullshit about the death of Stephen Gateley?), and it will itself stop spewing bile towards the unemployed and single mothers and start reaching out to them in that very Christian spirit of loving neighbours and wotnot.
And the big one, the Christian value I always liked because it was such a socialist attitude, the denying of riches. Yes, in the stories, Jesus once got super pissed that bankers were lending money in the church and threw an angry so mad that he turned their tables and sent the money flying everywhere. He also said something about putting camels in a blender and passing water through the eye of a needle or some such, but I'm not sure how that fits in. The point is, Jesus was not happy with wealth. The love of money, the Bible claims, is the root of all evil, and to that end Jesus apparently urged people to give what they had and be rich in humanity instead. How's that one going to turn out, Davey? How's the party who exist pretty much solely to profit the 1% and themselves going to translate Christ's values on wealth and greed? Will we see a maximum wage limit to stop private sector fat cats bleeding profits into obscene paypackets and bonuses? Are we going to see the bankers finally brought to heel with a Tobin tax to help the country fill the deficit partly caused by bailing them out in the first place? Will there be a clampdown on the multi-billion pound tax avoidance industry so prevalent in the City?
Of course not. And how offensive is Cameron's assertion that Britain is a Christian country going to be to the millions of Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and atheists who live here too, who were quite happy with the whole multicultural thing we had going on? People will defend his saying this, but think about this; if Cameron had replace the word "Christian" with the word "white", how shitty would his speech have sounded then? Not to mention that his statement is factually inaccurate - a YouGov poll recently asked people if they were religious. Only 29% said yes. A Christian country, Davey? I don't think so. A secular, cynical country that is steadily throwing off the shackles of blind faith and religious ignorance and intolerance. That is a country to be more proud of, isn't it?
In other news, atheism lost one of it's most well known voices, Christopher Hitchens. To be honest, I don't get it. He always seemed to me to be a supercilious, sneering pseudo-intellectual misogynist and Iraq war apologist. Atheism can do without poster boys like Hitchens.
