Councillor Tim Cheetham, a Labour councillor in Barnsley, has been watching Catholics venerate the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux on television. “With all those slobbering zealots kissing that glass case, I hope it has some mystical power to prevent swine flu,” he wrote on Twitter this morning.
That’s the authentic voice of 21st-century Labour. As Louise Bagshawe, novelist and Tory prospective candidate, immediately tweeted back: “Nice to describe faithful Catholics venerating a relic as slobbering zealots. Would you use such bigoted language about Muslims?”
Cheetham’s pathetic reply: “As the church has issued new guidlines [sic] about the conduct of ceremonies to protect against spreading disease, it needed saying.”
Bagshawe: “Labour’s anti-Catholicism is breathtaking sometimes.”
Indeed it is. Tony Blair’s relationship with the Catholic Church disguised the ferocious secularism of New Labour, which under Gordon Brown has increasingly focused on Roman Catholicism as an object of ridicule. (The Catholic bishops are slow to wake up to this fact, but one of these days they will have to give up their sentimental attachment to a party that hates them.)
Another tweet from Cheetham: “It’s not Bigotry to highlight the lunacy of dark age mysticism in the modern world.” Really? OK, then let me put you on the spot, councillor.
You say: “I will decry any faith that denies my right to question it in whatever form I wish.” Well, Muslims in Barnsley do object to the slightest criticism of their Prophet (who lived during the dark ages, as it happens) with his child wives and message of violence. But you’re a brave man, it seems. So go on: speak fearlessly and with your trademark withering disdain about the zealots in your own town.
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