Christians are now the most despised minority in Britain

It’s ironic, not to mention entertaining, that the very people who most enthusiastically embraced multiculturalism are the same people having the most difficulty navigating its consequences.

The Liberal Democrats, for example, have tied themselves in knots, and even provoked a formal complaint to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, over local activists’ decision to remove David Campanale as its parliamentary candidate in Sutton and Cheam. His crime? He is a Christian. Worse than that: he is a Christian who actually believes in biblical teaching – an unforgivable sin for the Lib Dems.

Campanale is not the first to have suffered at the hands of illiberal members of his party. In 2019, former Labour MP, Rob Flello, was chosen as the LibDem candidate for as its parliamentary candidate for Stoke-on-Trent South, which he had represented as a Labour MP between 2005 and 2017. Within 36 hours he was deselected, his socially conservative views as a committed Roman Catholic having come to light.

Tim Farron, who made it all the way to the leadership of the Lib Dems, was hounded by the media – and resigned shortly after polling day – because he was an evangelical Christian. In Scotland, Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes has been criticised by many, including newspaper columnists and SNP activists, for belonging to the Free Presbyterian Church. As with Campanale, Flello and Farron, Forbes’s crime is not in being a Christian per se, but in being an evangelical Christian and publicly stating that she accepts Biblical teaching.

But religious intolerance is not equally applied across the Left. When Mothin Ali won a council seat in Leeds as a Green Party candidate, he shouted “Allahu Akbar!”, proclaimed his victory a “win for the people of Gaza”, then described critics of this outburst as Islamophobic. It later emerged that he had claimed Israel had “control” of the mainstream media and had recorded himself chanting “from the river to the sea” at a pro-Gaza rally.

No one doubts that Councillor Ali sincerely believes in the teachings of Islam, yet no one has suggested that that faith’s condemnation of homosexuality should prevent him from representing the most Left wing – indeed, most “progressive” – party in the country.

The simple fact is that the Left is only capable of tolerating politicians who are “tick-box” Christians. Sir Ed Davey, the leader of their party, presents no problems for the party because he doesn’t wear his religion on his sleeve. He is not a God-botherer in the same way that Campanale, Farron and Forbes are. He keeps his faith to himself. To do otherwise, to state that you actually believe in Jesus Christ as your personal saviour – well, that’s just unacceptable, isn’t it?

Muslim candidates and elected representatives, meanwhile, need make no excuses for their personal faith. To criticise a Muslim, or any other minority, for the illiberal tenets of their faith would be prejudicial. But Christians? They’re fair game.

Part of the paradox is that, this being a Christian country, at least culturally and historically, we are more familiar with Christianity and therefore feel free to criticise it. But Islam remains, to most people, a mysterious faith about which we know little. Criticism of Islam just feels, well… wrong, somehow.

Therein lies the hypocrisy. If we are a truly multicultural, diverse nation, then everyone is equal, no adherents of any religion should enjoy any advantages, political or otherwise. All faiths are subject to criticism – that is part of the social contract between a state and its people in any secular, liberal democracy.

Here in the UK we know that’s not the case, yet our politicians and political parties refuse to address it. It would be unthinkable that the police would be called in to make a grovelling apology to the Christian community had a schoolboy kicked a copy of the Bible along the floor in a school dining hall. The prospect of a teacher being forced into hiding for fear of his life because he showed cartoons of Jesus to his class is a scenario so absurd as to be positively humorous.

Double standards are nothing new to the world of politics. But when our political establishment discriminates against Christians while failing to apply the same standards to other religions, something very serious has gone wrong with our democracy.