https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ion2005.uk
It's interesting the shift from "OFFENSIVE OPINIONS WOULD NOT MATTER IF HE WERE SIMPLY A PRIVATE CITIZEN" fifteen years ago to the ONLINE SATETY BILL currently going Parliament that intends to CRIMINALISE HURTY WORDIES.Catholic church condemns Tory 'conspiracy theorist'
Fri 4 Mar 2005 17.22 GMT
A Tory candidate who believes the EU is a Catholic plot to impose Vatican sovereignty over Britain was today accused by the Catholic church of preaching a conspiracy theory traditionally associated with the far right.
In an article in the Spectator magazine, Adrian Hilton, who is standing in Slough, argued that "a Catholic EU will inevitably result in the subjugation of Britain's Protestant ethos to Roman Catholic social, political and religious teaching".
His outspoken views prompted the spokesman for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the leader of the Catholic church in England and Wales, to accuse him of deploying "the sort of argument that tends to be made by extreme Protestants or radical nationalists".
"These views are bizarrely ahistorical and fundamentally erroneous, and an unfair depiction of the Catholic view of Europe," the spokesman said.
He added that Mr Hilton's article "assumes England did not exist as a nation before the Reformation, and has taken a few bizarre ideas and turned it into a conspiracy theory".
Defending his views, Mr Hilton insisted that "a Protestant view of history is every bit as valid as the Cardinal Archbishop's", and said making "an assertion of the law cannot be bigotry or conspiracy theory".
"It is unfortunate that, in this day and age, if one expresses an Islamic perspective it has to be accepted, if one expresses a Roman Catholic perspective it has to be accepted - and yet an assertion of the constitutional position of her majesty the Queen and parliament with regards to Protestantism is greeted with derision."
The row over Mr Hilton's comments comes only weeks after Tory officials had to drop the party's previous candidate in Slough, Robert Oulds, after photographs of him posing with his gun collection appeared in the tabloid press.
Under the headline "Tory gun nut", the Sun newspaper featured photographs of Mr Oulds lounging on a bed holding a revolver and posing with an AK-47.
Mr Hilton - who holds the world record for the fastest non-stop recital of the complete works of William Shakespeare and is a religious studies teacher at the town's grammar school - was last week selected as his replacement.
Labour's deputy campaign coordinator, Fraser Kemp, said he believed the new row showed the Slough party was in the grip of "Michael Howard's Militant Tendency", and needed to be closed down and "purged of its extremists".
"Mr Hilton's offensive opinions would not matter if he were simply a private citizen - but he is a candidate of a major political party trying to win a seat the Tories only lost in 1997," Mr Kemp said.
Mr Hilton outlined his view that European integration would lead to a "Catholic Caesar presiding over the [British] Protestant monarch" in an article, headlined Render unto the Pope, published in the Spectator in August 2003.
"The issue of European religious union is one that has been concealed even deeper than the plans for political union, but the ratchet towards a Catholic Europe is just as real," the article claims.
"A Catholic EU will inevitably result in the subjugation of Britain's Protestant ethos to Roman Catholic social, political and religious teaching."
Mr Hilton is a veteran of Eurosceptic politics, having written a polemical account of the development of the EU, entitled The Principality and Power of Europe.