At least the Ayatollah of Canterbury is honest, Mr Brown

The poor old Ayatollah of Canterbury doesn't actually deserve all the slime now being tipped over his modernised mitre. Just some of it.

Of course it is absurd for the chief of the Christian Church in this country to cringe publicly to Islam. But at least Archbishop Williams is open about his unwillingness to defend the faith – as is his colleague, the wretched Bishop of Oxford, who recently announced that he was perfectly happy for loudspeakers to blare the Muslim call to prayer across that city.

Even on their own liberal terms, this pair are clueless about sharia and its scorn for women.

It was exiled Iranian Muslim women who defeated a similar proposal in Canada. They had travelled thousands of miles to escape sharia law and didn't want it in Toronto, thanks very much.

Compare that with the Government, which poses stern-faced as the foe of "terror" and noisily jails figures of fun such as Abu Hamza while greasily pretending that there's no connection between Islam and terrorism.

Gordon Brown's Cabinet has also quietly agreed that Muslim men with more than one wife can now claim benefits for these extra spouses – while bigamy remains a criminal offence for everyone else, punishable by up to seven years in prison.

And what about the discreet little Whitehall celebrations of the Muslim festival of Eid, attended by highly placed civil servants?

Or the incessant multi-faith propaganda in supposedly Christian State schools, where children known to me have been pestered to draw pictures of mosques but are given virtually no instruction in the faith and scripture of our own established Church?

Why is it that in Britain, alone of all countries in the world, the most exalted, educated and privileged have all lost the will to defend their own home? Most of us liked it the way it was before they began to "modernise" it.

I know of nowhere else where those most richly rewarded by a free society are so anxious to trash the place that gave them birth and liberty.

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Helena's Sweeney Todd, a gory slice of musical tripe

What joy to learn that cinemagoers are walking out of the new Tim Burton movie Sweeney Todd once they discover that it is a musical, a fact omitted from the trailers.

Watching Johnny Depp and the increasingly strange Helena Bonham Carter trilling away as the blood flows is hardly a good way of spending an evening, unless the alternative is extraordinary rendition.

Nothing could induce me to go to a Tim Burton film anyway. If I want to be put off my lunch I can always watch Prime Minister's Questions.

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But why anyone on earth should wish to watch a musical about cannibalism, I really do not know. What is it about film critics? Why do they praise such weird productions?

This week most of them (though not our excellent Matthew Bond) are simpering about There Will Be Blood, a creepy festival of tedium that drags on for a bladder-busting 150 minutes, contains not one sympathetic character and makes no sense at all.

Go and see the under-rated Charlie Wilson's War instead. There's a fair bit of profanity, but it's funny, true, instructive and worth seeing alone for the moment when Congressman Wilson asks the President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan for a large Scotch.

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Nurturing children - perfect job for 'a mate'

My colleague Liz Jones thinks men should be angry if their "driven, highly educated mate" decides to stay at home and raise the next generation.

Why? They should be pleased. What better use for a good education is there than to pass on what you have learned to your children?

Does Ms Jones really think schools will endow pupils with the wisdom of the ages and sow the seeds of reading, imagination and poetry? Fat chance.

Why is it better to slog off to an office, to stare at computer screens and compose memos in the Martian dialect of modern business before eventually slogging home via the wine bar to collect the children from some day orphanage or bog-standard school, where they will have spent the day having their brains filled with TV rubbish?

This disdain for the most honourable and valuable task that falls to us is a disease in our society. I suspect those who express it are trying to hide from themselves that it is wrong.

If our wounded civilisation lasts another hundred years, our grandchildren will be horrified by the cruel, self-indulgent lies we told ourselves to justify the dumping and neglect of an entire generation, in return for nothing better than cash and handbags.

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We've discovered the blindingly obvious ... yet nothing changes

It's time to set up a University of the Blindingly Obvious, just to cope with all the amazing discoveries about what's wrong with Britain now being made by the people who didn't notice when it mattered.

Warnings issued in this column over the past seven years or so, derided or ignored at the time, are now becoming conventional wisdom, for what that's worth.

Week after week, learned reports emerge concluding that the police spend too much time filling in forms, that children do better with married parents, that multi-culturalism breaks up our society, that mass immigration hurts the poor, that cannabis rots the brain, that social mobility stopped when the grammar schools were closed.

And after the report comes out, absolutely nothing happens. Nothing.

And do you know why? Because our entire Establishment don't care.

They want the police handcuffed by rules designed by Left-wing lawyers.

They like mass immigration. They want to be free to smoke dope, or let their children do it.

They can buy good education for their own young, but prefer egalitarian dud schools for your offspring, because it's a principle, see?

You can be as outraged as you like about this, just as you are about Britannia being removed from the coinage.

You can be completely opposed to the acceleration of anti-marriage propaganda into school sex lessons, under the guidance of homosexual militants.

But will it make any difference? No it won't. Labour, Lib Dem and Tory alike all support these things, and the discredited ideas that lie behind them.

As long as you support any of them, especially the useless, useless Tories – who are worse than the others because they pretend to be against what they're actually for – you'll get exactly what you deserve.

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•If all advertising of tobacco products is forbidden, how come the country is plastered with posters urging us to buy cigarette papers? Is it because New Labour doesn't think they will be used for smoking tobacco? Joined-up government at work.

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