Bernard Ingham: A Royal wedding and the collapse of Christian confidence

That is certainly what uSwitch.com, the price comparisons outfit, has found. It says that 70 per cent of us regard ourselves as middle class, even if 60 per cent of us think our parents or grandparents were lower down the social ladder.

That doesn’t leave many horny-handed sons of toil when you discount the toffs, the vast army of “celebrities” who have very grand ideas about themselves, if not conduct to match, and the shirking classes.

We who doggedly refuse to abandon our working class roots can now truly say: “There are very few of us left.”

Like the Church of England, we are on our last legs, even if Friday’s Royal wedding would seem to prove otherwise.

Oh, the CofE can still put on a show like no other in its beautiful historic buildings. Indeed, it is still, thank God, at the heart of national occasions. It is, after all, the established Church.

But for how long? That is the question. The forces of darkness, which have been gathering since the 1960s, increasingly lay siege to belief, values, the family and Christianity.

Let us rejoice that Prince William and his bride will demonstrate their failure in one particular. They will show that disillusion with marriage has not yet reached the Royal family. The Windsors are still prepared to set an unfashionable example.

But have no doubt that the enemy within will not be content until we are a godless nation in which all excess can be explained away and excused.

All too often they are ably assisted by the very people who should be resisting them – the clergy of the Anglican church from the top downards.

These are bleak thoughts in the aftermath of Holy Week. But these are bleak days in which no one can any longer be surprised what the clergy get up to. Discipline, it seems, has flown hand in hand with common sense out of the vicarage.

As we watch the Royal wedding on television, many of us, I’ll bet, will be distracted by wondering what the priests performing the ritual of marriage really do believe in. What really lies behind the holy blessing they dispense with practised ease?

I ask because for most of our lives we have seen Christianity, the whole basis of whatever greatness we can claim in this world, in retreat before destructive forces bent on mining and sapping the very fabric of our society whether it be social order, education, criminal justice or the work ethic.

The collapse in Christian confidence, if not total, has certainly been abject in the face of what is risibly described as liberal opinion.

No one in my experience is less tolerant – especially of values and tradition – than our so-called liberal intelligentsia. Take their contempt for Margaret Thatcher who represented a serious blockage on the road to their ideal of a moral desert.

It is not just that they encourage Wakefield van drivers to be hounded for having a Christian cross on the dashboard of their company van or the denial to scores of others of the right to wear a crucifix at work.

They have so drained the Christian spirit that Muslims get away with persecution of Christians in their own lands while demanding untold rights here in Britain.

When, dear Lord, is the Church of England going to stand up for itself and its flock? Never, if the Bishop of Oxford is any guide. This prize example of our clerical fifth column has just, in the name of all that’s liberal, inclusive and bad, recommended that church schools should limit their faithful intake to 10 per cent, even if it lowers educational standards.

Understandably, he is the hero of the hour among secularists, if not necessarily other faiths. His declared aim, even at the cost of child achievement, is to “serve the wider community”. Yet what serves the wider community better than a school that delivers disciplined, morally reinforced, properly educated and ambitious pupils?

That is just what this nation needs today.

In truth, our egalitarian bishop does not want church schools to be nice, middle class enclaves. So where does that leave most of the population, and especially devout Christians, who now regard themselves as middle class?

Potentially shut out of their own house. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.