Welby Drops Another Mega-Clanger!

Bill Carmichael: Archbishop’s ‘fascist’ jibe over Brexit is typical of a sneering elite. Yorks Post.

WHEN the Archbishop of Canterbury is forced to take to Twitter to deny he had branded almost half the electorate as “fascist”, you know the Church of England has landed itself in an unholy mess once again.

Justin Welby made the contentious remarks at the opening of the General Synod in London this week when he likened the 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit to the “fascist tradition of politics”.

Stung by the reaction to his comments, Welby took to the social media platform to deny that was his view and pleading with people to read his actual speech.

So I did, and these are his actual words taken from the Archbishop’s own website: “There are a thousand ways to explain the Brexit vote, or the election of President Trump, or the strength in the polls in Holland of Geert Willders or in France of Madame Le Pen and many other leaders in a nationalist, populist, or even fascist tradition of politics.”

This seems pretty unequivocal to me. Despite his later denials, he is clearly making a direct link between Brexit voters and fascism. Presumably the speech was put together with some care, so if he didn’t mean those words, why in heaven’s name did he say them?

It is easy to get annoyed with such inflammatory and provocative remarks, but then you think: “Why bother? It is only the Church of England.”

And therein lies the tragedy of the modern church – condemned to ever-greater irrelevance with each achingly-trendy pronouncement.