I KNOW that this is pretty old news by now, and we journalists and columnists are expected to be bang up to date, but I just can’t get out of my head the horrific account of how the parents of Shafilea Ahmed murdered their 17-year old daughter because she wanted to live a normal teenage life.

And then they lied about it. If they were sincere in their “religious” beliefs, why didn’t they own up, with pride?

Fundamentalist Islamic bigotry should have no place in a northern English town. It’s more than bigotry. It plain and simple barbarism.

And the worst of the barbarism is that this sordid, bitter, hateful murder of a child of one’s own loins can be described as “an honour killing.” Where’s the “honour”

is such a murderous disgrace?

I’m glad the judge awarded the callous, slaughtering religious bigots life imprisonment, saying that they serve sentences of 25 years at least. Surely, one of the greatest evils of our time is political correctness, according to which, we are not allowed to criticise bigotry, brutality and sadism wherever it appears.

Instead we have to tread carefully in case we incur accusations of “racism” and “Islamophobia”.

I am neither a racist not an Islamophobe.

But I do insist that no one should be allowed to cite the tenets of his religious customs to put himself above the law. No one is above the law. That is one of the few glories left in our bedraggled British constitution and way of life. But for how long?

It is morally indefensible to employ barbaric pseudo-religious customs to justify cruelty and murder. Imagine the outcry if a Christian or a Jew were to commit this sort of palpable evil? Just imagine the indignation that would immediately erupt from The Guardian and the BBC. But, as George Orwell, might have said: all religions are equal, but some religions are more equal than others.

Multiculturalism is the great destructive lie which has caused destruction in British society for the past 30 years.

Multiculturalism is meant to suggest all sorts of different religions and cultures living in harmony. It means the very opposite.

It means separate development and the option extended to preferred minorities to opt out of our common life. When this happened in South Africa, and there was a separation of the races, the Left in Britain condemned it – rightly – as Apartheid. When it happens in our country, they applaud it.

I served for years as a priest in northern towns such as Oldham and Bolton. There was an easy-going community among the different races and religions in those days.

I was privileged to teach in a Bolton school the bright children of those industrious East Africans kicked out of Uganda by the tyrant Idi Amin. The parents of these children exhibited tremendous public spirit and transformed the social and commercial life of the town. Recently I visited Oldham and Rochdale. These wonderful traditional communities have been divided into ghettos.

Each race and culture keeps to its own.

This is not a recipe for national unity, for a people all pulling together in a common cause. It is, frankly, a disgrace of which we should be ashamed and it bodes a future too terrible to think about.

It is the next generation I’m concerned for.

They have done nothing to deserve the terrible fate inflicted by religious bigotry.

  • Peter Mullen is the former Rector of St Michael's Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.