Ed West

Catholic Herald Notebook, August 21

This week sees two important anniversaries relating to that glorious year, 1989: the election of Poland’s first non-Communist prime minister since the Second World War, and Hungary opening its border to Austria, signalling the first physical dismantling of the Iron Curtain. 

It was an awesome autumn, the first great counter-revolution in European history, with liberal democracy overthrowing hard-Left democracy. As an 11-year-old I was in awe of the brave Germans, Poles, Czechs and especially the Romanians, who had had enough of inhuman socialism and wanted to come back to western civilisation. 

The previous year the authorities in Kensington, with the help of the Ukrainian community, had erected a statue of St Volodymyr on Holland Park Avenue, ostensibly to celebrate the anniversary of this rather obscure saint who converted in 988, but really, so everyone believed, to irritate the Russians in the embassy nearby. (We did not go as far as the Iranians, who renamed the road on which the British embassy in Tehran stood “Bobby Sands Street”.) 

A generation later there are no permanent memorials or tributes to those brave men and women – both western and eastern European – who helped bring down Communism. Where is our Wa??sa Street or Havel Square? 

But of course there were less well-known heroes, including many Catholic clergy and laity. The antiCommunist revolution in Europe started with the Church in Poland, and in East Germany Lutheranism became the focus of resistance. 

This is worth reminding people when the argument is made that bishops should not interfere in politics. And it is also worth remembering that the National Secular Society has twice awarded their “secularist of the year” award to Communists. 

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I’ve felt slightly uneasy at the recent Governmentorganised Twitter campaign, #ilovetheNHS, which was in response to some rather ridiculous claims made about the NHS by Americans opposed to a more socialised healthcare system. 

Of course anyone who’s ever been treated for illness or relieved of pain is extremely grateful to the doctors and nurses involved, and one is also thankful to live in a society where it is provided free of charge. 

But there are certain things I certainly do not love about the NHS – aside from its bureaucracy and waste, and its exploitation by people who get breast enlargements or Viagra at our expense. The world’s second largest bureaucracy commits 100,000 abortions a year, and taxpayers fund 80,000 more through subcontracting the service. 

One of the lesser mentioned American concerns is that an American version of a socialised medical system will be used to promote socialist principles. If Britain is anything to go by. that is certainly the case. 

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I’m no fan of the Society of St Pius X – they are a little strange for my taste – but I feel their application to buy an Anglican church in Manchester being turned down is down to ignorance and prejudice. 

The Church of England refused to sell St George’s in Gorton because some local councillors complained, one Liberal Democrat calling the group “the church of latter-day Holocaust deniers”. 

The SSPX as a whole are nowhere near being Holocaust deniers and if we had to ban religious buildings because of the anti-Semitism of one of its members there might not be a mosque left in England.