And so, with his job now on the line, the Archbishop’s fightback begins. It is, predictably, the Prufrock Defence: that wasn’t what I meant at all.
On his website, he insists that he was not proposing ‘parallel jurisdiction’ of sharia and British law. No indeed: the phrase he actually used was ‘plural jurisdiction’ which is much further-reaching and more radical, implying a smorgasbord of legal traditions from which the modern citizen can pick and mix.
Charles Moore is – as ever – a must-read in the Daily Telegraph, as is Matthew Parris in The Times who advances the fascinating thesis that the practical implications of the Archbishop’s thesis are not liberal at all but local-communitarian and (potentially) deeply conservative.
The Guardian does not disappoint with a column by Madeleine Bunting saluting Dr Williams’s courage and an editorial grandly dismissing ‘The
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