Lilley’s timely dig at the bossy bishops
by Julian Mann, TCW:
LORD (Peter) Lilley did a significant service to demoralised Church of England parishioners with his witty intervention in the House of Lords last week.
During the Report Stage of the Safety of Rwanda Bill, the former Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher told Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby that he ‘had better check his white privilege and his colonial assumptions, or he might find himself in trouble with some of his bishops’.
The Church Times reported the story with a picture of Lilley under the headline ‘Bishops rile Conservatives in Lords’ Rwanda debate’. But that was client journalism.
In reality, Lilley’s comment was a brilliant dig at the neo-Marxist wokery that is destroying the C of E. The context was that he had pointed out in the Rwanda debate that the Blair government had enshrined in law the concept of a ‘safe country’. The Asylum and Immigration Act 2004 required ‘a listed third country of removal to be treated as a place where the person’s life and liberty are not threatened or, where the person is not at risk of deportation to another country, in contravention of the Refugee Convention’.
Lilley told Welby: ‘I do not recall him, any right reverend prelate or any lawyer, over the many years that that (2004) Act was in place, ever decrying it in the way they decry this proposal. What is the difference?
‘The first is that, in those days, the list was all of white countries, and now we are dealing with a black country. I warn the Most Reverend Primate that he had better check his white privilege and his colonial assumptions, or he might find himself in trouble with some of his bishops.’
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