Liberal fascism and a man hounded by moral pygmies — for being a Christian
TO BE absolutely honest, until yesterday I couldn’t have given two hoots whether or not Tim Farron was leader of the Liberal Democrat Party.
He led a lacklustre election campaign that failed to re-establish the Lib Dems as a political force at Westminster.
But I do believe it is nothing short of outrageous that Mr Farron felt forced to step down because of his devout Christian beliefs. Mr Farron says he could either be Lib Dem leader or a devout Christian: he did not feel it was possible to be both.
Could there be any more damning statement about the state of British political discourse?
Like many Christians, Mr Farron takes seriously Biblical injunctions against abortion and against homosexuality. It was these deeply held beliefs which brought him into conflict with members of his party, and which were ridiculed by some sections of the media during the election campaign.
‘To be a political leader — especially of a progressive, liberal party in 2017 — and to live as a committed Christian, to hold faithfully to the Bible’s teaching, has felt impossible for me,’ he said in a heartfelt statement on Wednesday.
It is clear that Mr Farron suffered some emotional turmoil during the election campaign, avoiding straight answers when pressed — or, more correctly, harangued — on gay sex and abortion.
But crucially, Mr Farron has always made clear that his views on such matters are entirely personal, and that he has never once sought to impose them on others; and I believe him.
Parliamentary convention means that he could never have imposed such views even if he had wanted to, because issues such as homosexuality, abortion and divorce are viewed as matters of personal conscience rather than of party principle.
But that is not good enough for Mr Farron’s critics.
In the words of the comedian David Baddiel, Farron is ‘a fundamentalist Christian homophobe’. In other words, beneath contempt. A lower form of life. Worthless.
Mr FARRON felt his life had been made unbearable. ‘... I seem to be the subject of suspicion because of what I believe and who my faith is in,’ he said.
In other words, he has been driven out of public life by political correctness.
This is a matter of grave concern that goes right to the heart of public debate in Britain. It is the latest example of a malign modern trend that has been labelled by some as a ‘liberal fascism’ — though I prefer the term ‘liberal intolerance’.
Liberal intolerance means that in modern Britain you have perfect freedom to think what you like — as long as you agree with those who know best, that small ruling elite, every member of which shares the same fashionable, metropolitan views.
Writing in The Catholic Herald newspaper, the religious commentator Peter Williams noted that Mr Farron would have been perfectly acceptable if he had agreed to be a ‘revisionist Christian’ — someone who has abandoned some traditional teachings in favour of a more moderate and modern take — with views that were ‘indistinguishable from the metropolitan secular consensus’.
But he dared to express views outside the consensus, and was therefore to be regarded as an extremist and pariah who has to be hounded off public platforms.
We saw a telling example of this when Channel 4 news presenter Cathy newman treated Farron as if he was a serial criminal when she interviewed him at the start of the election campaign and focused on his beliefs. In fact, Tim Farron’s only crime is to hold views shared by virtually all priests, bishops, archbishops, rabbis, imams and other religious leaders since the beginning of civilisation.
Like Farron, I am a Christian though I take a more tolerant view of homosexuality than he does, and strongly believe in gay marriage.
On abortion, which Farron views as ‘ wrong’, I believe that the law needs to be reviewed as medical advances have allowed more very premature babies born below the 24-week legal abortion limit to survive.
But none of that matters. I fully accept the sincerity of Mr Farron’s views, and, above all, I believe in his right to hold them. His own party clearly doesn’t.
Farron came under pressure to stand down after Brian Paddick, a gay former Metropolitan police commander, quit as Lib Dem shadow home secretary because of his ‘leader’s views on various issues’. Yesterday, Paddick’s former front bench colleague, David Laws, who is himself gay, welcomed Farron’s resignation, declaring that ‘you cannot be a leader of a liberal party while holding fundamentally illiberal and prejudiced views which fail to respect our party’s great traditions of promoting equality for all our citizens’.
I know Mr Laws well and greatly admire him, but I am afraid it is Laws — and not Tim Farron — who fails to understands the true Liberal tradition.
LIBERALS believe in freedom in all its shapes and sizes. That means free trade. Free markets. Freedom of thought. Free speech.
The modern Lib Dem Party does not believe in those freedoms. It supports state control of markets, allows only one set of politically correct opinions and is bitterly opposed to freedom of thought.
This is a terrible betrayal of the Liberal Party of old and of its famous fighters for freedom, such as the philosopher Bertrand russell, and the Victorian statesman and four- times prime minister, William Gladstone.
These formidable men really did believe in freedom. In common with the French liberal thinker Voltaire, they might disagree with someone’s opinions but would fight to the death for his or her right to express them.
I imagine that very few modern Lib Dems can have heard of John stuart Mill, the great 19th century philosopher, despite the fact that he was actually the founder of modern liberalism.
He had many magnificent achievements to his name, including being the first MP to call for women to get the vote.
He devoted his life to a cause that is hated by modern Lib Dems — namely, freeing the individual from the injustice and barbarism of state control.
He also fought hard for freedom of speech and thought.
His book, On Liberty, published in 1859, is one of the greatest and most influential ever published in the English language, calling as it does for all but unlimited freedom of speech. In a famous passage that has echoed down the ages, Mill maintained that it is essential that even ‘false opinion’ is heard.
Firstly, Mill pointed out, we can never be sure such opinions are false. secondly, argument and debate keeps everyone on their toes. And thirdly, Mill held that eccentricity was greatly preferable to uniformity.
Most of all, Mill was opposed to the suppression of minority opinion. He wrote that ‘unmeasured vituperation, employed on the side of prevailing opinion, really does deter people from expressing contrary opinion, and from listening to those who express them’.
As THE experience of Tim Farron shows, modern Liberal Democrats are greatly in favour of suppressing such opinions. How Mill, with his wisdom and magnificent use of language, would have cut down the intellectual and moral pygmies of today’s abject Lib Dem Party.
The truth is that Tim Farron has been a reasonably good Lib Dem leader, especially when compared with his predecessor, nick Clegg.
Clegg used his leadership to impose a dogmatic conformity on what used to be the most diverse and freedom-loving political party in Britain.
His brand of metropolitan consensus was especially hostile to marriage and traditional family values that have always been the bedrock of the kind of robust independence that real Liberal leaders have historically supported.
He permitted vicious attacks on anyone who held views different from his, as when his environment spokesman, Ed Davey, insulted anyone who questioned conventional scientific thinking on climate change as ‘dogmatic’ and ‘blinkered’.
The Lib Dem intolerance of anything that challenges their own very narrow world view is authoritarianism at its worst.
What a wretched betrayal of everything their great party used to stand for! And what an irony that a modern political leader could get driven out just for holding Christian beliefs.