Writing in Church Times, The Rt Rev’d Nick Baines, Bishop of Leeds, has spoken of a crisis of “truth and trust” in UK politics caused in part by Prime Minister Boris Johnson who, alleges Baines, has “repeatedly lied, and misrepresented Brexit to the nation.” Bishop Baines says that Boris Johnson has “lied repeatedly” about the motivation behind his decision to prorogue parliament days after MPs returned from summer recess, until two weeks before the Brexit deadline of 31st October.

Baines is a fully-qualified and paid up ecclesiastical leftie: that is a member of the breed which consistently regards facts and the truth as things that are infinitely malleable. How otherwise could he remark that, on Brexit, “The will of the people is not immutably clear.” No use our reminding Baines that there really did take place a national referendum in 2016 in which the people stated their opinion – that they wish to leave the EU – with perfect clarity. That was an exercise in practical democracy. But “democracy” and “leftie” are words which struggle to occupy one and the same sentence uttered by men like Baines. Lefties, especially modern European lefties, have a history of ordering populations who vote for motions which they, the lefties, dislike to go back and vote again until they get it right. I’m not making this up: just ask the Danes.

Who else but a leftie so extreme could declare that, “The Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph coverage of Brexit is like something from Nazi Germany”? Baines declared exactly that. I first began to doubt Baines’ grip on reality when I read that he had once delivered the annual Harold Wilson Lecture.

Baines’ leftism is of course thoroughly international and his abusive diatribes know no boundaries. Predictably, he disapproves of Donald Trump:

“His misogyny, amorality, financial track record, sexual behaviour, narcissism and nepotism – to name but a few of the obvious challenges – would have ruled out the candidacy of any other semi-reputable politician for the Presidency of the United States of America. His subsequent lying, shamelessness, vindictiveness and inhabiting of some alternative reality – in which things that happened didn’t happen and things that didn’t happen did happen; in which things he said he didn’t say, and things he didn’t say he did say – cannot have come as a disappointing revelation to anyone with half a brain or ears to hear.”

Everything I have written here about Baines’ likes and dislikes, attitudes and prejudices is standard fare among lefties. So far so unexceptional. But Baines is able to outdo them all. One example, out of a very many, will do. He wrote: “No one in their right mind would deny a link between Christianity and the IRA.”

One needs no emetic.

Author: Peter Mullen

First published in The Salisbury Review: https://www.salisburyreview.com/blog/an-enemy-of-the-people-in-plain-view/

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The image is of Ripon Cathedral, one of the three cathedrals of the Diocese of Leeds. Image by Gary Ullah from UK [CC BY 2.0]. Image source.