by Gavin Ashenden
Ann Widdecombe, Cain and Abel, and the civil war between the sacred and the profane
Suspended Animation
After the death of Ann Widdecombe, and before the police complete their investigations into the motives of her murderer, we are living in a strange moment of suspended animation.
We know what is coming, but not quite how it is going to play out.
We are in the middle of a longer period of conflict between the rage-filled, power-hungry progressive Left and the weakened pillars of post-Christian civilisation. At stake are freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and a disputed anthropology.
The contested philosophical question is whether a man needs saving from himself by God, or can save himself by the exercise of political power and the punishment of those who dissent.
The matter has been complicated by the behaviour of the police. The glue of social cohesion, which trust in the police has provided, has been tragically eroded one step further.
We have no explanation as to why they would want to tell the public things that were self-evidently untrue—“there is no evidence of a political motive”—unless they were invested in depriving the public of information that would have made it anxious and outraged.
But in one sense, there are some of us who believed we did not need to wait for what the police are going to tell us about the motivation of the murderer.
We don’t need to wait, not because we’re impatient, but because we already know the answer.