Over the weekend the BBC and other media was calling for the head of a certain David Silvester, a councillor of the UKIP party in Henley-on-Thames. His crime was to write the following letter to his local paper, the Henley Standard. Since I can find the complete letter nowhere, I think it would be good to post it here:
Divine disapproval
Sir, — Since the passage of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, the nation has been beset by serious storms and floods.
One recent one caused the worst flooding for 60 years. The Christmas floods were the worst for 127 years. Is this just “global warming” or is there something more serious at work?
The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters such as storms, disease, pestilence and war.
I wrote to David Cameron in April 2012 to warn him that disasters would accompany the passage of his same sex marriage Bill but he went ahead despite a 600,000-signature petition by concerned Christians and more than half of his own parliamentary party saying that he should not do so.
Now, even as Cameron sheds crocodile tears on behalf of destitute flooded homeowners, playing at advocate against the very local councils he has made cash-strapped, it is his fault that large swathes of the nation have been afflicted by storms and floods.
He has arrogantly acted against the Gospel that once made Britain “great” and the lesson surely to be learned is that no man or men, however powerful, can mess with Almighty God with impunity and get away with it for everything a nation does is weighed on the scales of divine approval or disapproval. — Yours faithfully,
Councillor David Silvester (UKIP)
Henley Town Council, Luker Avenue, Henley
These views, involving as they do the suggestion that unnatural vice is wrong, has provoked an artificial media storm, demanding his head pour encourager les autres. The BBC led the charge, and broadcast the “controversy” endlessly. Dr Goebbels would be very proud of the orchestrated “two-minute hate” now raging.
We are rather accustomed to these witchhunts, these days, in modern Britain. Those who do what they know to be wrong cannot stand the slightest reminder of their wrongdoing.
I was amused to read some churchy types solemnly pontificating about Mr Silvester’s supposed theological naivety. How embarassed they were! On the contrary the view he expresses is pretty solidly biblical. That it is unfashionable need not detain us.
Mr Silvester’s statements are thought-provoking. Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether, being unfashionable, he is right?
I had not, myself, seen the matter in these terms. I blamed the flooding on embezzlement and negligence. For I knew – what is fairly commonly known – that the authorities have long ceased to dredge the rivers, or to repair the flood defences properly. The money raised in tax to pay for this very necessary work has been diverted for other purposes. Until now, I had not thought beyond this, to the hand of God.
But maybe we should. For a nation with a corrupt ruling class, which is busy with its own pleasures and indifferent to the public weal, will indeed experience floods, fires, disasters of every sort. This is indeed the verdict of God on their corruption and selfishness; the one produces the latter. God has created a world in which vice usually has consequences; and thank God for that.
If those rulers were attentive to business, if they repaired the sea-defences and did the million duties which they are paid for, then such natural disasters would not occur, or would be merely signals for concerted public endeavour.
Instead the floods come every year, to much empty handwringing from the officials who should be preventing them, and from the BBC, which bears so great a responsibility for the climate of opinion in which dereliction of duty is presented as a virtue.
Isn’t this the mechanism where a nation that has abandoned God experiences the hand of God?
Of course the worst injuries affect ordinary people, and not those in power. So it has always been.
In the mean time we may congratulate David Silvester for his chance to tell the truth to the nation. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.