Jackie Ashley: Very Bad Argument

A very bad argument from the point of view of certain on the left I mean. She still hasn’t quite grasped that what the Catholic Archbishops are saying about politicians and abortion is not something new, it’s the established view of that curch. If you procure, take part in or vote for abortion then you have excommunicated yourself from the Church. You should not, thus, take Communion until you have been to confession and asked for forgiveness of that sin.

All very simple and it’s about the rules of being a Catholic, nothing else.

However, the argument that ought to really rather rile people is this one:

How many MPs are elected because they are Catholic, not because they
are Labour or Conservative? The answer, of course, is none. There are a
mere 4.2 million Catholics in Britain.

4.2 million eh? 7.2% of the population? Now, as it happens, I agree. Politics is politics and it certainly ain’t religion (we’ve managed to avoid the Northern Irish experience, thank goodness).

But, err, Asians (ethnically) make up 4% of the population, blacks 2% and ethnic minorities in total 7.9%. Yet we have endless campaigns telling us that this is in some way a horror, that we are denying people "their representation" because the proportion of people from those groups in Parliament is less than their proportion in the country at large.

Either we have group rights, in which the 7.2% of Catholics have to weigh as heavily upon the law as the 7.9% of ethnic backgrounds, or we do not have such group rights, we just have politics.

I prefer the latter of course, once we’ve got over the minor matter that Catholics are the only remaining group it is legal to discriminate against.

10 responses

  1. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    “How many MPs are elected because they are Catholic, not because they are Labour or Conservative?” That’s just silly: there are surely swathes of the “West of Scotland” where you have to be both Labour and Catholic. And Irish Catholic at that: some nice young Catholic boy from the Outer Isles wouldn’t prosper.

  2. Mark Wadsworth Avatar
    Mark Wadsworth

    I thought it was also still OK to discriminate against white men in the UK.

  3. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    Didn’t the Sunday Times go to print in the mid 1990s on some revealing investigations into sectarian staff recruitment practices of the Monklands Council in Scotland? Not much of that still survives on the web today apart from these references:
    “The area was also hit by the Monklands cronyism scandal in the mid-1990s when it was alleged that council jobs were being reserved for friends and relatives of councillors. It was further alleged that a mainly Catholic ruling group of councillors was biased towards the mainly Catholic town of Coatbridge when spending decisions were made, and that the mainly Protestant town of Airdrie lost out. No malpractice was found by a government inquiry.”
    http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=789102006
    “From ‘Monklands’ to ‘Lobbygate’, in recent years Lanarkshire has been a byword for Labour sleaze, for sectarianism, cronyism, nepotism and vicious party in-fighting.”
    http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=594&id=1134242002
    “Cronyism is the problem. We accept that there is a culture of cronyism in some parts of Scottish local government. It needs to be exposed and eradicated. That cronyism is often based on one-party-state councils. We recognise that that culture then works its way up through the system. The SNP view—that PR will solve all the problems—is simplistic in the extreme. The Liberal Democrats have gone silent on PR, as they did on cronyism, so as not to upset their coalition allies.”
    http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/business/officialReports/meetingsParliament/or-01/sor1129-02.htm
    “1223. There had been a series of very high profile scandals – I use the term fairly loosely but they get presented in the media as scandals – one going back to 1994 with a by-election in East Monklands, almost exactly ten years ago after the death of John Smith, where the Labour Party itself was torn over the issue of nepotism in allocation of council jobs.”
    Getting the Balance Right Implementing Standards of Conduct in Public Life
    http://www.public-standards.gov.uk/upload/assets/www.public_standards.gov.uk/oral%20evidence.pdf

  4. I believe that it’s still legal to discriminate against the ginger, too 🙂

  5. Mark Wadsworth Avatar
    Mark Wadsworth

    Well, I was going to mention gingers but that would be special pleading, being a ginger myself, so maybe I am a tad sensitive on this issue.

  6. Ian Bennett Avatar
    Ian Bennett

    The argument appears to be that we must all be represented by someone ‘like’ us, as determined by whatever happens to be the metric du jour. As my MP is Alan Milburn, I must assume that Darlington is populated largely by self-serving, sycophantic hapf-wits.

  7. “there are surely swathes of the “West of Scotland” where you have to be both Labour and Catholic.”
    Dearieme, that’s a load of shite. And offensive shite with it.

  8. Mark Wadsworth Avatar
    Mark Wadsworth

    Dearieme, that was spot on, and not offesnive in the slightest.

  9. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    I’ve been seriously troubled about the Catholic church’s strict adherence to its rules since learning that Galileo wasn’t formally exonerated until 1992, by Pope John Paul II, for the grievous sin of publicising his heretical insight that the earth goes round the sun:
    http://astronomy.nmsu.edu/kurt/Astronomy110G/Lectures/Galileo&Newton.pdf
    What happened to all those poor souls who passed on believing this damnable heresy to be true?

  10. Wadsworth,
    Are you a so-called ‘Irish Catholic’ from Glasgow? I am, have never voted Labour and never will but have still had to listen all my life to people like ‘Dearieme’ (aka William Paterson, Ph.D., of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering) make insidious insinuations concerning the relationship between one’s politics and religious beliefs.
    His bigotry rests on the supposition that if you’re of Irish extraction, or Catholic, or both you are somehow mentally inferior, incapable of assessing an issue under discussion in the public square on its own merits and so have to be led by the nose. So, yes, Wadsworth, it’s offensive.
    Bill being Bill, if his track record’s anything to go by the next stop will be making unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable allegations of fundraising for the IRA in Catholic churches –
    http://martinkelly.blogspot.com/2006/09/question-for-bill-paterson.html
    Bob,
    “What happened to all those poor souls who passed on believing this damnable heresy to be true?”
    They went to heaven, because it’s kind of understood that God knows better than popes.

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