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Saturday 6 September 2008

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

With public sector pay, start at the top. In the regular Civil Service, pay is probably not excessive. Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, is paid about £255,000 per year. It is the people brought in from outside to various quangoes, agencies and authorities who really scoop the pool. My old friend and pillar of the modern establishment, Adair Turner, has just been made chairman of the Financial Services Authority, for which he will be paid more than £480,000, whereas the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King is entitled to less than £400,000, of which he has decided to accept only £297,919. The chief executive of Ofcom, Ed Richards, for no obvious reason, received £417,581 in the year 2007/8. The director-general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, gets £816,000. Cut, cut, cut.

As I write, it is not known whether Max Mosley has defeated the News of the World in court, but if, as this column hopes, he has, it will be the second time in his life that he has benefited from the paper. When his parents were imprisoned during the war, the young Mosley boys (Max was three months old) went to live with their aunt Pamela (née Mitford) in Oxfordshire. Her then husband, Professor Derek Jackson — RAF officer, nuclear physicist, seven wives — was very rich from a shareholding his family had in the paper, of which his father had been chairman. It is a pleasing thought that there may today be a baby Murdoch who will sue his grandfather’s newspaper in 68 years’ time.

Almost every time you read an article commenting on people who, for religious reasons, disapprove of homosexual marriage, practising homosexuals becoming priests and so on, you find the word ‘bigot’ used. Even intelligent commentators (last weekend’s crop included Sam Leith and Rod Liddle) seem to think it unarguable that such attitudes are bigoted. Why? To this day, all the mainstream monotheistic religions of the world take the view that homosexual acts are wrong, and they have reasons of scripture and wider moral teaching to back this up. Believers who maintain that view in the face of modern social pressure are only following their faith, just as Christians would be if they opposed polygamy, suttee or euthanasia. The word ‘bigoted’ does have an accepted meaning. It does not mean ‘religious’, or even ‘fervently religious’. Bigotry is the obstinate and blind, often nasty and hypocritical, attachment to a particular creed. No doubt some people who oppose gay marriages are indeed like this — venting hatred towards homosexuals (which their religion forbids) — but many are decent, conscientious and thoughtful. Isn’t it rather bigoted, in fact, to assume that your opponents on certain subjects are bigots? It is like the way anyone who criticises Islamist extremism will find himself described as ‘Islamophobic’.

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