Guy Fawkes ye olde jihadist

WHITEHALL admitted last week it keeps no record of allotment waiting lists. Bet that changes when Jeremy Corbyn becomes PM. Children need to learn how religions can lead to terror

DESPITE some frustrations during my 30 years covering Parliament, I’ve never felt like blowing it up.

Which is why I tuned in to BBC drama Gunpowder to see what motivated those who tried on 5th November 1605.

Once you get over Game of Thrones’s Kit Harington playing the smouldering and moody lead plotter Robert Catesby, as if he’s still the smouldering and moody Jon Snow, it’s rather good.

Some viewers complained of too many disembodied heads and too much disembowelling, but that brings home what English life was like then.

To be a Catholic living in England was like being gay in Islamic State-held Mosul or Raqqa.

And now both cities have fallen, such dramatisations might give some insight into the mindsets of the 400 British IS fighters heading home.

Long before Catesby and Guy Fawkes came along, Catholic and Protestant heretics were hanged, drawn and quartered or burned at the stake across Europe.

Which lot got persecuted depended on the religious persuasion of the monarch on the throne at the time.

The Catholic Bloody Mary torched 227 men and 56 women, yet she was not nearly as bloody as her Protestant pop Henry VIII who ordered up to 72,000 executions, including a brace of wives.

Like Christianity, Islam also split – into Shias, who believe in the hereditary principle, and Sunnis, who don’t. Significantly, perhaps, it was born 600 years after Christianity.

Which means today’s IS burnings and beheadings are taking place at around the same point in the religious evolutionary cycle.

Whatever your opinion of that observation, might it not be good raw material for debate in schools when history of religions is discussed?

I’m now convinced jihadi terrorism will be ended only by primarily addressing its religious cause. That’s down to better religious education so children can properly interrogate the 21st century relevance of holy books such as the Bible and the Koran.

They need to discover how one book inspired atrocities down the centuries, and another does so today. A deeper understanding might stop young kuffars, as Islamists call nonbelievers, becoming Islamaphobes, and Muslim children becoming Islamists.

And discourage British citizens from wanting to blow up Parliament again.