Labour's Mote and Lambeth's Beam

Other than the Conservative Party and our free and cantankerous Press, the British institution best qualified to comment on prejudice is undoubtedly the one that has spent much of the past few decades contorting itself into ever more complicated knots over whether women and homosexuals might qualify as fully human. As a leader of the spiritual community whose founding documents include a quartet of increasingly violent anti-Jewish screeds and whose record of intolerance is second to none in history, the Archbishop of Canterbury last week continued his endless crusade for headlines by endorsing Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis' attack on Labour in the Murdoch Times. Apparently under the impression that the spiritual leader of Britain's Orthodox synagogues is some sort of Archbishop of Jewry, Britain's most over-promoted trendy vicar hurried to tout "British values" as opposed to racist exclusionism, thereby provoking a genuine anti-racism campaigner to walk out of the church's charmingly-named committee for minority ethnic Anglican concerns. Gus John, an academic with some little history of serving sanctimonious hypocrites their own arses, cited "discrimination and exclusion, benign and sugar-coated or otherwise, at every level of organisation in the church" and was even tactless enough to mention the hostile environment policy of Justin Welby's sister in Christ, Theresa May.