This is Alan Craig, councillor for Newham and candidate for The Christian Choice, a joint political venture from the Christian Peoples Alliance and the Christian Party. Frightening…
Alan promises to promote marriage and stable families as a long term solution to youth crime, educational underachievement and poverty. He also seems quite opposed to the construction of a so called ‘mega-mosque’ in West Ham that I’d never actually heard of.
According to Alan it is a terrible scandal. His Youtube video accuses the backers, an Islamic group called Tablighi Jamaat, of various seditious and treacherous activities, such as printing glossy pr brochures and failing to observe council planning laws.
He shows himself up as a bigot early on with his hasty translation of ‘jihad’ as ‘military service’. A quick Wikipedia search showed it to mean something more like ’struggle’ or ’striving’. In modern standard Arabic, the entry continues, jihad is one of the correct terms for a struggle for any cause, violent or not, religious or secular. The same terminology is applied to women’s liberation movements in the Arab world.
Like most UK Christians, Alan has all the presence of a cardboard cut out, and the rhetorical skills to match. In his party election broadcast he laments the “enormous sense of distrust that pervades
London” and attacks as its cause what he calls the “aggressive secularisation” of our political leaders and a market driven culture of greed. I don’t where he’s been for the last 10 years, but the sanctimonious Christian prattlings of Tony Blair, George Bush et al seem to have passed him by.
Alan seeks answers in the Bible, that well known handbook of town planning and local government administration. “It’s all about care,” he says, “Combatting poverty, respect for the elderly and unborn alike.” The spectre of London women having to go to Watford for an abortion looms…
Alan is big on Christian values and restoring traditional notions of family. To that effect he backs the work of churches in the community and generously promises £1000 to every couple getting married in the capital. In fact, it seems Alan sees these two policies as the answer to all of London’s ills. He has nothing to say on important areas like transport and policing, which have occupied the mainstream candidates.
I’ve never trusted Christians. To me they seem the most two faced of all religions: likely to burn you at the stake or torture you to death while harping on about forgiveness, brotherly love and the welfare of your eternal soul. At least with Al Qaeda you know where you stand. Like Al Qaeda, Alan Craig’s candidacy for Mayor is part of a worrying global trend towards religious tribalism. Politics should always be a secular enterprise, as personal religious beliefs are a matter of personal conscience. By allowing religious rhetoric into political discourse we risk going further down the road of a state that intervenes in the personal lives of citizens for their “own good.”
So far, UK Christians have not managed to attain the rhetorical skill and strong grass roots organisation of the Christian Right in the USA, so we have little to fear from them immediately. But their message is gaining ground in the British political discourse. Our political leaders are increasingly pious: Gordon Brown’s puritan injunction against supercasinos and increased taxes on alcohol are just the latest examples of the state’s attempts to save us fom our own vices.
Luckily, Alan is unlikely to win; but he is a sign that secularists need to stay on their toes.
Filed under: London, London Mayor , atheism, christians, islam, London, London Mayor, politics
