Author Archives: Tim Lenton

Henry (Fred) “Shrimp” Houseago, 87, the legendary activist and newt-chaser, has emerged from hiding to attack plans to cripple and exploit motorists in Norwich and elsewhere.

Mr Houseago was once voted the person with the most influence on Norfolk life, narrowly beating Richard “Volcano” Meek, the admired explorer, into sixth place. With the assistance of his former fiancée, Dorothea Goodchild, he conducted a long and genial campaign against the influence of newts on town and country planning, accusing them of conducting a “divisive and deceptive propaganda-driven attack” on the Norfolk way of life.

He is now concerned that one consortium of great-crested newts is making a comeback, sometimes using the name Transport for Norwich, and sometimes the name of a former Leeds midfielder who prefers to remain anonymous for obvious reasons.

He says the newts want all of Norwich, even those roads that are closed – which is most of them – to have a maximum speed limit of 20mph. This is because 20 rhymes with “plenty”, which Mr Houseago describes as “the most unfortunate linguistic coincidence this century”.

He adds: “It will soon escalate, or possibly decelerate. You mark my words, we’ll soon be regaled with ‘Ten is Zen’, and some other so-called genius will be made an MBE.”

Comet-chaser and whole food chef Len “Kissme” Hardy, an old opponent of Mr Houseago, denied that the 20mph project was pointless and a vanity project. He also claimed that public consultation was carried out in order to find out what people wanted, but this suggestion was discounted as “far-fetched” and in some cases “ludicrous”.

Mr Houseago, in a burst of research-led thinking, pointed out that Manchester City Council had abandoned a plan for a city-wide roll-out of 20mph limits because it wasn’t having the anticipated benefits. But Mr Hardy retorted that Leicestershire County Council, which was nearer and therefore more likely to be right, wanted more average speed cameras, regardless of whether they were needed or not. Unfortunately the DfT did not think this was a good idea.

Mr Houseago said it just went to show that even the DfT could be right occasionally.

Meanwhile a newt representing Twenty’s Plenty said there should be no need to ask people whether they wanted things, because newts already knew what was best, and it was a waste of time. “That’s typical,” said Ms Goodchild from her almost inaccessible home in the centre of Norwich.

Comedian Tracey Ullman has produced a couple of sketches recently that poke fun at the an attitude to Christianity which seems to be becoming increasingly prevalent in our green and pleasant land.

The first portrayed an applicant for a job who was received enthusiastically until she mentioned she was a Christian, when the interviewers stepped back, thinking she must be weird. The second portrayed a baptism which was going well until the godmother mentioned that she was glad to do it because she was a Christian, when the parents recoiled. Then the vicar revealed that he too was a Christian…

If part of the job of a comedian is to laugh at the absurdities in society, this was spot on. I am aware that not everyone in the UK is a Christian or even believes in God. But it is a country founded on Christian principles, and part of the reason so many people want to live here is that we have a rule of law founded on those Christian principles. The Christian ideas of love, freedom and justice still mean something.

But there are disturbing signs that all this is at risk. This week a Christian MP was questioned by the BBC and by a colleague because she came straight to a parliamentary committee from an Ash Wednesday service, where traditionally a small ash cross is marked on the forehead.

The Spectator reported: “To her credit, she kept her ashes intact, explaining: ‘I think they just thought I didn’t want to be embarrassed – but I was not going to rub it off. Many religions have visible symbols and Christians should not feel any embarrassment in either practising their religion or in the public display of religious symbols.’”

A small thing, perhaps, but the so-called BBC blew it up into a big issue on its website and Facebook site. Why? Would they have questioned the actions of people of other faiths in the same way? I suspect not. It’s more what The Spectator goes on to call the Secular Inquisition, which everyone expects.

More seriously, because it involves the justice system, it is now under question whether preaching Christianity outside of church is permitted – despite the fact that our history shows that the evangelism of people like the Wesleys probably saved the country from violence and divisions in the past.

Two street preachers in Bristol were convicted of a public order offence after the prosecutor claimed that publicly quoting parts of the King James Bible in modern Britain “should be considered to be abusive and is a criminal matter”.

He told the court that “although the words preached are included in a version of the Bible in 1611, this does not mean that they are incapable of amounting to a public order offence in 2016”.

He also claimed: “To say to someone that Jesus is the only God is not a matter of truth. To the extent that they are saying that the only way to God is through Jesus, that cannot be a truth.”

It may not be a truth to everyone, but it is a serious claim not confined to 1611, and one that under any realistic  view of religious freedom must be capable of being expressed to others. If it is expressed in an abusive way, that is another matter, and totally out of tune with the actions of Jesus himself. But in this case it was the listeners who became abusive. Were they prosecuted? Of course not.

Do we want to remain a Christian country? I suggest it is essential for the sake of our sanity and security. In the past few weeks a Hindu mob invaded a Christian peace festival in India, beat up the pastor and attacked other Christians; in Egypt some 200 Christian families have had to flee the northern Sinai town of Al Arish, where six Christians were recently murdered and Islamist threaten to ethnically cleanse the area. There are many similar examples from other countries.

Could it happen here? We may scoff at the possibility. But if we go along with the idea that Christians are weird or habitually abusive in their beliefs, we are sliding, and it may be that in the words of Leonard Cohen, “things are going to slide in all directions”.

Some Christians certainly are weird – some people say I am myself – but my beliefs are not, and I do not want to be afraid to express them. At the moment the ignorance of prosecutors and magistrates may simply be mildly alarming – even absurd. But is it just the thin end of a quickly widening wedge?

Once upon a time, a man (though he could have been a woman) lived in an enclosed room. He had everything he needed. It was a large and exciting room, and there was plenty to keep him occupied.

Being an intelligent kind of guy, he investigated every part of his environment and became an expert on it. He developed ways of working out what it was made of, and even where it might have come from – assuming that nothing had changed in the way things worked since the beginning.

He decided that it was very, very old and had come into existence by chance. He invented a theory to explain how this might have happened, although it was not entirely convincing. However, as he pointed out, there was no other theory.

It was suggested to him that perhaps there was something outside the room, but he found this was an unsatisfactory idea, because it could not be tested. In fact, he felt that people who thought such a thing possible were in some way mentally deficient.

He examined the room in great depth and worked out what would happen to it eventually.

He knew that after he was gone some people would find out more about the room, and that was fine. Eventually everything there was to know about the room would be known.

Some people said there were things in the room that he could not detect – perhaps things that could go in and out without his seeing them. He thought this was stupid, because if he had no experience of them, they could not be there.

He wrote many books about the room, and they explained many things about it. But none of them explained why it was there, or why he was there. Or who he really was.

He did not think these were good questions.

One day his room exploded. Nothing survived.

When 1984 passed without much sign that George Orwell’s prophecies were coming to pass, we might have been permitted a sigh of relief. But there are signs now that such a sigh would have been premature.

The kind of society envisaged by Orwell is now at the door, and not primarily because of the swing to right-wing politics. It may in fact be time to abandon the terms right-wing and left-wing, because both of them have the capacity to destroy freedom through imposing their own doctrines on people generally.

One of the signs of a 1984 society was the corruption of language, so that words did not mean what they seemed to mean. Today we are stigmatised if we are not “tolerant”. But what does that mean?

It used to mean, in the words of Tim Dieppe, accepting the existence of ideas with which you disagree. “It now tends to mean accepting all other ideas as equally valid, unless you happen to disagree with this meaning of ‘tolerance’ – in which case you are not ‘tolerated’.”

People who believe that there are absolute truths or moral values are often said to be intolerant, though this is not necessarily the case at all. If I believe that certain lifestyles  are wrong, I am just expressing an opinion, and it is impossible to deduce from that how tolerant of other opinions I am. It is even less logical to jump from that to say that I hate those who have a different view.

What we can easily end up with here is a society where those accused wrongly of hating are in fact being hated (and not tolerated) by people who believe they themselves are tolerant and hate-free.

Spooky? What about the idea of equality? Sounds wonderful, but it has come to assume a moral neutrality of all beliefs. Some people believe it is neutral not to believe in God, but in fact that is often just as strong a belief as being a Christian.

The Equality Commission in Northern Ireland prosecuted Ashers bakery for not being willing to make a cake that would promote same-sex marriage – in fact refusing to act against their beliefs, which did not involve hate or intolerance.

Felix Ngole, meanwhile,  was expelled from Sheffield University after posting on Facebook an opinion in support of biblical teaching on marriage. What is that all about? Surely it is intolerance by the university of views that it disagrees with, plus lack of respect for free speech. As Voltaire (an atheist) would have said, even if we disagree with an opinion we should defend absolutely the right to express it.

In the near future holders of public office, such as school governors, civil servants, councillors, parliamentarians, police and judiciary, may be required to swear an equality oath – that is, an oath to uphold British values. If those values require agreement not to express certain views, Christians could be barred from public office. Is this what we want, when our basic freedoms in the UK have grown out of a Christian heritage?

There are other examples of 1984 behaviour – for example “hate incidents”, which the police are obliged to investigate on the basis of one person’s view of something quoted elsewhere. And the agreement between the EU and social media companies like Facebook and Twitter  to take down any posts if “civil society” groups claim they constitute “hate speech”.

This effectively allows lobby groups, including Islamists, to censor opinions they disagree with by getting their members to mass report them.

Tolerance? Hate? Equality?

Confused? You will be.

Everyone I know seems to be ill. This is what is known as hyperbole. Sometimes it’s known as flu, or man flu. Other times it’s a bit of a flu. Occasionally it’s flue, but that’s just a spelling problem.

Here are some things you can’t do:

soldier on with flu

fight off flu

go to work with flu

have a bit of a flu

Flu is an extremely debilitating virus which renders you weak, aching and incapable of functioning in any normal way. You usually have to go to bed for a few days, and if you’re not in bed, you’re probably on your way to or from the loo.

Flu is not a synonym for a bad cold or a persistent cough. I am 71, and I’ve had flu twice in my life. It’s not something you forget, and it gets very irritating when people use the word lightly. It’s a bit like blasphemy.

There is no such thing as man flu. There is such a thing as malingering, but women do it too.

You can, if you like, have a flu-like virus, which generally means you’re achey and shivery and have no energy. It’s not good, but it’s not flu.

Why am I so bothered about the misuse of the word flu? Partly because over the years I have been susceptible to colds. I have an upper respiratory tract that is sensitive and easy to drive crazy. When I have a cold, my nose not only streams; it feels as if ants are running up and down it and biting. My eyes are sore and pour out water. My head feels as if it’s in a pressure cooker, and I sometimes have a sore throat too. I really can’t do anything but curl up until it goes away. I can’t read. I can’t watch television.

This is not flu. At worst it’s an upper respiratory tract infection. But it is disabling, which is why I get mildly annoyed by people who “just keep going” with colds and merrily infect anyone in their vicinity – many of whom get much worse symptoms than they do.

There is also the difficulty that if you stay at home with a cold, certain people will look at you askance. What? Just a cold? What kind of wimp are you? Well, since you ask, I’m the kind of wimp who would love to get the kind of mild cold symptoms that you do.

I’m not really whining. It just sounds like it. I am actually very grateful that I don’t get chest infections, or bronchitis, or pneumonia. Not yet, anyway. What I get is not life-threatening –  just very, very unpleasant.

My wife has just had a really nasty virus that generates symptoms of a heavy cold, plus a persistent cough and lack of energy, and which appears to go on and on. This is bad, but it is not flu. I believe the Queen had it, but it was not Royal Flu, though that is how it was described in newspaper headlines.

I understand that: I used to write newspaper headlines for a living. Flu fits nicely into narrow columns and big font sizes. But it is still wrong. Wrong, do you hear me? Wrong.  Just wrong.