TV’s sneering Jon Snow and the hypocrites who stand up for free speech — until you dare to disagree with them

AFEW months ago, I took part in a public debate alongside Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow. The topic discussed was Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the American presidential election.

Mr Snow had strong views and was eager to explain that he’d been in the u.S. for three weeks during the election campaign, and therefore was something of an expert.

He said: ‘With the exception of major centres — Los Angeles, Washington, New York and of course San Francisco — I’m afraid to say that Americans are mainly racist. That’s what they are.’

This struck me as a very dangerous assumption. Surely it would have been impossible for him to make a proper assessment of the views of more than 300 million people — particularly in such a short time.

It was obvious that the openly Leftwing Mr Snow’s opinion was purely based on the liberal metropolitan consensus of people such as himself who are cocooned in their own world.

It is a viewpoint which is invariably contemptuous of the attitudes of the vast silent majority — and at worst is arrogantly undemocratic.

I recalled this episode the other day when Lib Dem leader Tim Farron was sneeringly attacked by similar metropolitan intellectuals over his views, as a Christian, about whether homosexuality is a sin.

Typical was Mr Snow’s Channel 4 colleague Cathy Newman who grilled Mr Farron in a way you would expect someone to be treated if they were facing prosecution for genocide and crimes against humanity. THIS

followed Mr Farron’s refusal to make clear his position, merely saying that he would not ‘make theological announcements’.

Comedian David Baddiel had joined the fray, saying the Lib Dem leader was ‘a fundamentalist Christian homophobe’. The undisputed fact is that Mr Farron is a Christian who is inspired by his beliefs and who attends church every week.

He is definitely not one of those politicians who cynically uses his faith to try to buy votes.

For example, Tony Blair, who was said to have sought authorisation from God to take this country to war in Iraq. Nor is he like David Cameron, who joked about his religious beliefs, saying his faith ‘ comes and goes’ like the fluctuating radio signal for Magic FM in the Chilterns.

The fact is that Mr Farron’s Christian beliefs have not made it easy for him in politics — particularly leading a party with liberal policies on social issues.

For example, he abstained in the parliamentary vote for same-sex marriage in 2013.

Now, to his critics, it’s almost as if his Christian faith is a crime. How very revealing this is of their own unprincipled mindset. To them, anyone with strong religious beliefs deserves contempt.

Yes, Mr Farron can be criticised for lacking the guile of his predecessor, Nick Clegg, or the languid charm of his party’s much-missed former leader Charles Kennedy.

But to Mr Farron’s great credit, he refused to be bullied by his enemies — and for that, even though I have liberal views on homosexuality and support gay marriage, I am starting to feel sympathy and warmth for him.

As commentator Peter Williams noted in the Catholic Herald, if Mr Farron was a ‘revisionist Christian’, with sexual ethical beliefs ‘indistinguishable from the metropolitan secular consensus’, he would have escaped persecution.

But, not wishing to give ground to his opponents, Mr Farron tried to hold out and refused to say whether he thought homosexuality was a sin.

Eventually, however — doubtless under pressure from advisers — he felt obliged to clarify that he thinks ‘being gay is not a sin’.

Sadly, I believe he was a victim of what — for want of a more elegant phrase — is the paradox of liberal fascism.

In a nutshell, this covers people such as Jon Snow who are noisy advocates for freedom of opinion — just so long as everyone holds the same opinion as them!

It is a shame that Mr Farron did not continue to stand up to this pernicious culture.

He ought to have had the guts to say that his religious beliefs are a private matter.

That said, it is impossible for a politician to keep private their views on those great issues of public morality — such as abortion, euthanasia, divorce and homosexuality. For, as MPs, they vote to pass laws concerning these subjects which govern the way the rest of us live. But the truth is that Parliament has a long tradition of leaving these matters to personal conscience. For example, in the Seventies, the Liberal Party leader David Steel was responsible for making abortion easier. The law was approved on a free vote in the Commons.

There is another worrying aspect to this nasty hounding of Mr Farron.

Many MPs are Catholics — belonging to a Church which is seen by some as treating women as second- class class citizens because it refuses to allow them to become priests. Yet I have never seen them targeted in the same way as Mr Farron.

This unsavoury debate proves just how far we have moved on as a society from the days when our greatest politicians were all men and women with deep religious beliefs.

For example, there was Liberal leader William Gladstone. And, too, Margaret Thatcher, who was mocked by the metropolitan chattering class for her unfashionable Methodist upbringing.

I fear that one of the reasons we no longer have giants of this calibre is the poisonous and destructive insistence on a narrow conformity of belief.