Better Sharia law than no law at all

The trouble with gentle, tolerant Christianity is that while it is quite enough to support a morality and social order serving gentle and tolerant people living in leafy suburbs, it is no good at all for keeping order among barbarous and illiterate yobs and feral children living in the inner cities.

For them a more fundamental form of Christianity - one concerned to inculcate fear rather than love of God - is required, and if the Church of England does not supply this, the mutton-chopped Bishop of Rochester fears that Muslim fundamentalism might rush in to fill the gap.

Of course this is an over-simplification. In his Standpoint article he actually calls for Anglicans to return to their Victorian rigours across the board.

Unfortunately there is no chance in hell of today's highly educated elite renouncing their humanistic

religion ­ - political correctness and human rights etc - about which they are already fanatical. No chance of today's Oxbridge dons accepting chastity as they did in the Victorian era. No, the problem lies squarely among the relatively poor who cannot buy themselves out of the evils of the permissive society.

As it happens, Anglicanism never made much progress in the slums. There, it was always the secular arm of the state that maintained morality and social order with a degree of firmness which the humanist governing class no longer allows them to use.

Under these circumstances, a Muslim takeover might not be such a bad idea. Better Sharia Law than no law at all. Better Islamic authority than no authority at all. Incidentally this is what the Archbishop of Canterbury, ­ the bearded one, ­ recommended a few months ago. Perhaps he was right.