IN a call that will be enthusiastically taken up by the BNP, which champions Christian civilisation, the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, Carey has urged the new Labour Party Premier, Gordon Brown, to introduce much harsher immigration controls in order to protect Britain’s Christian identity.
The BNP will understand at once what the holy man means.
He means that brown and black-skinned Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists should be kept out of the country, and the new favourite immigrants of the British ruling class, the all white Christians, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Romanians, Bulgarians, and even Russian Christian billionaires should be allowed to flock in.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Sunday programme about his hopes for the Brown government, Lord Carey said that there was a need to balance control with ‘clemency in the case of some people who need refugee status’.
Just what is this Christian identity he speaks of. It is the identity of the state and the ruling class. The monarch when he takes office swears to be the defender of this state religion and identity.
Britain is a capitalist, imperialist state, and the Christian Church has been at its side, blessing every one of the dirty deeds that it has carried out over the last 300 years from Ireland to the Middle East.
The British capitalist identity was built out of the slave trade, the triangular run from Bristol to the West Coast of Africa, from there to the southern parts of the United States and then back to Bristol, having first acquired slaves, and then sold them for cotton, sugar and chocolate.
What ended slavery was not the protestations of any church – it blessed and enriched itself from the institution – but the development of capitalism itself, and the superiority of wage labourers in the production of the surplus value that capitalists strive to acquire.
Even in the great clash of social systems in the United States – where southern slavers sought to expand at the expense of the development of the capitalist Yankee north – the British state and its Church supported the slave owners, and even sought an opportunity to enter the war on the side of the South, while it was the working class, despite the cotton famine and mass unemployment produced by the war, which supported the North, 100 per cent.
The Christian identity of Church and state was in the vanguard of the championship of the Combination Laws that made the development of trade unions illegal, presided over a legal system that transported hundreds of thousands to Van Diemens Land for petty crimes, fuelled by hunger, and then opposed every progressive movement to expand the franchise, from the Chartists to the suffragettes.
The Church had not the slightest problem with the late 19th century grab for Africa, and indeed participated in it, and also holding down Ireland, with great energy and enthusiasm.
It also found no difficulty in supporting the two great imperialist wars of the 20th century, and the latest imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Christian identity of Britain is therefore this unity of Church and state in the exploitation of the workers of the world.
What is upsetting the Archbishop is the loss of empire that has reduced Britain’s stature, pauperised the middle class, taken away its sense of purpose and led to a massive weakening of religion, a growth of atheism.
This has now reached the point where the Christian clerics perceive the Muslims and others as threats not only to their Christian identity but to their livings as well. As Karl Marx remarked in the preface to the first German edition of Capital in 1867: ‘The English Established Church, e.g. will more readily pardon an attack on 38 out of its 39 articles than on 1/39th of its income.’
Trotskyists oppose the British Christian identity. We fight for working class internationalism and the maxim ‘Workers of the World Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.’
We call on the working class to reject nationalism, and bourgeois or feudal religion, in favour of the organisation of the socialist revolution to overthrow capitalism, and in its place bring in socialism and human solidarity in place of reactionary mysticism.
