The collapse of an employment tribunal due to social media comments by a panel member may seem like a win against anti-Christian bias but actually the story is indicative of the grim future for orthodox Christians in the general public square.
The comments by non-legal tribunal member Jed Purkis, who describes himself as a lifelong socialist, led to all three members of the panel, including the judge, recusing themselves on Monday in a case brought by a Christian teacher against a primary school and Nottinghamshire County Council.
As Christian Today reported on March 27: “Their recusal got here on day six of the tribunal’s hearing into the case of the teacher, who claims she was dismissed after raising safeguarding concerns in regards to the school’s affirming approach to an 8-year-old female pupil wanting to develop into a boy.
“She was sacked after she shared information in regards to the child with lawyers as she sought a judicial review into the varsity and native council’s handling of the kid’s transition.
“The Christian Legal Centre (CLC), which is supporting the teacher, said that the trial is predicted to start afresh later this 12 months with a recent panel.”
Purkis’s social media posts included a response to a comment that only atheists ought to be in public office: “Damn right, you will not catch us killing within the name of our non-god.”
He also responded to the query of “What’s collective noun for Tories?” by suggesting “a tumour of Tories” and a “cesspit of Tories”.
Purkis’s outlook is definitely mainstream on the contemporary Left which has a zero-tolerance attitude towards conservative views. Alastair Campbell, the strategic genius behind the New Labour project which led to the party’s landslide election victory under Tony Blair in 1997, posted this week on X that the Tories’ track record on running the NHS was so bad that they “ought to be annihilated at a general election. Not just beaten. Annihilated”.
Campbell, who was Prime Minister Blair’s chief press secretary after which director of communications and strategy in Downing Street, wrote in a subsequent post: “In my view no Tory MP deserves to be re-elected due to the enormous damage they’ve done to our country, our public services, our standards and standing on this planet.”
So, where will His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition come from then, Mr Campbell? From the Scottish Nationalists or the Liberal Democrats, that are thoroughly Leftist parties? Are voters with conservative views, Christian or otherwise, allowed any representation within the House of Commons? He doesn’t say.
But in apparently refusing to countenance conservative views, the Left are treating secular politics as an all-embracing religion. There appears to be no room for disagreement and even uncertainty of their utopian worldview. The Left is so certain of its righteousness that opposition amounts to wickedness.
The view that the Left’s hegemony is unchallengeable was actually displayed by Tony Blair himself, the striker within the political football team that Campbell managed with such Alex Ferguson-like rigour. Mail on Sunday columnist, Peter Hitchens, in his speech in 2022 on the annual Roger Scruton Lecture in Oxford, held in honour of the late conservative philosopher, recounted “a rare moment in Wellingborough on the 5th June 2001, when Blair openly sought to prescribe the policy limits of the Tory Party”.
Blair said in the course of the 2001 General Election campaign: “At this election we ask the British people to talk out and say the general public services are Britain’s priority, to say clearly and unequivocally that no party should ever again try and lead this country by proposing to chop Britain’s schools, Britain’s hospitals and Britain’s public services. Never again a return to the agenda of the eighties.”
Hitchens, an Anglican Christian, commented: “I believe this was an unguarded moment. I used to be there, and recall attempting to ask Blair about it afterwards and getting nowhere. But I even have all the time thought that Labour had eventually grown strong enough to impose a wish long voiced by such figures as Aneurin Bevan and Harold Laski, to forestall any Conservative government from overturning its major measures.”
The Left has now won cultural hegemony within the UK. It has been in power since 1997, though not in office for the reason that 2010 General Election when Blair’s successor Gordon Brown didn’t woo the voters and left Downing Street after the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats formed a coalition. Labour is poised to win sole political office again within the 2024 General Election and, after the likely realisation of Alastair Campbell’s desired fate for the Tories, retain it for a very long time.
Orthodox Christians who imagine they need to get up for his or her biblical convictions in the general public square have to brace themselves for the fact that the triumphant Left-wing utopians answerable for the country think like Jed Purkis. They see traditional Christians as evil and their views as intolerable.
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
