Britain's Thought Police

"I grew up knowing that half Europe was free and half was not and was taught to rejoice that I lived in the free bit. In those days Britain was genuinely free: at the height of the cold war you could stand for parliament as a communist. Despite having shed blood and sacrificed so many lives to fight Nazism we still allowed people to belong to Nazi movements and I remember the antics of Oswald Mosely and Colin Jordan.

"You could believe anything, belong to anything, preach anything unlike those poor guys on the other side of the iron curtain who faced a knock on the door at dawn from the KGB if they presumed to dissent from prevailing orthodoxy. We pitied them from afar.

"Now Britons face a knock on the door. It will not be the KGB, it will not be at dawn and we will not be dragged off to the Lubyanka but it will be an ordinary British bobby, once a source of reassurance and now more than ever expected to fill the role of the thought police."

When I read the above introduction to Anne Widdecombe's article in the next edition of The Difference, it thought it was going to be about the succession of Criminal Justice and Terrorism Acts that this Government has passed in recent years. It is in fact about the Sexual Orientation Regulations and their lack of provision for religious conscience. Concerned that insufficient time for debate was allowed in Parliament and that inadequate provision has been made for religious conscience, the media celebrity MP makes this apposite comparison:

"To insist that homosexual couples must be able to adopt through a particular agency takes law on to a new and oppressive level. A woman may have an abortion but she is not entitled to demand it of any particular doctor, nor can any member of the medical profession be forced to assist in the process."

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