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Three cheers for Rowan Williams!
The standard of debate in this country is deplorably flat, stale and unprofitable, as anybody who listens to or watches Any Questions and Question Time has come to regret. Never an original idea or a memorable phrase. The effort by panellists to say nothing which might be taken amiss is quite tangible.
It is better in the print media, but not much. There, too, rigorous or demanding thought, as against facile rodomontade, is pretty well eschewed.
That is why the Archbishop of Canterbury deserves three cheers. Once again he has chosen to express interesting and complicated ideas in difficult and sophisticated language. But instead of the media rising to the challenge and continuing the debate at the same high level, they mostly have reacted with at best over-simplification and, at worst, personal abuse.
Multicultural Britain is bound to require painful changes in its system of law; and it follows that this arduous process must necessarily involve a quality of debate maddeningly difficult to follow by all but a highly intelligent elite - like the one the Archbishop was addressing.
That he should recognise this is much to his credit. Not all debate can be accessible to all. Would that some of our politicians took his cue and also refused to dumb down.
Dr Williams is a good and holy man, with a subtle intelligence, earnestly seeking to lighten the path ahead. Is such a contribution now unacceptable in modern Britain? I fear so, and this is a far more dangerous development than any small concession about sharia law. ·
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I have no respect for either Williams, a man in a frock who takes himself far too seriously, or Worsthorne, a poser with far too high an opinion of his pedestrain intelligence who attempts to dismiss criticism by claiming it's all too intellectual for the critics to understand. There may well be a 'highly-intelligent elite' but Peregrine isn't part of it, he belongs to the 'not very bright but extremely privileged from birth' class.
His total lack of understanding of what is happening in 'multicultural' Britain illustrates perfectly the blindness of the privileged who never get to see the ethnic ghettos or the frictions building up between different immigrant communities and the wider British culture - it's all too working class for people with names like Peregrine to have any comprehension of.
The complacency of these people is staggering. 'Let them eat cake' comes to mind. He appears to think he is part of a small band of really intelligent people, and all the rest of us have difficulty in thinking. That's the problem with a privileged tory upbringing, it papers over the simpletons and gives them a conviction of their own superiority unconfirmed by reality.
Do you pay this person for his spurious views?
Although I have the greatest respect for both Dr Rowan and Mr Worsthorne, I am disappointed that they see the inclusion of some aspects of Sharia Law as beneficial to British muslims. Perhaps they are part of that set that views Islam as a religion of peace, whose law would enable family disagreements between muslims to be settled without recourse to British law. However, may I suggest that they are ignoring the fact that such a move would allow the fanatics in Islam -- of whom there are an alarmingly increasing number worldwide -- to make further inroads into normal life by enforcing their interpretation of Sharia to the detriment of women, human rights and good order.