Time to hand out a little love (From The Northern Echo)

Time to hand out a little love

11:41am Tuesday 16th August 2011 in Peter Mullen By Peter Mullen

SOMETIMES I come close to believing in God. I mean, how about this: I was on my way to St Michael’s to take the morning service last Sunday when I was met with an elegant old man and his frail wife in Newgate Street, just behind St Paul’s. She asked me where she could find Christ Church Greyfriars. I said: “I’m afraid you can’t. The church was destroyed in the war and there’s only the spire left.”

The old girl looked at me so lovingly, so wondrously. She said: “Which war?”

I said: “The Second World War.”

Then – and this was the bit that turned me inside out – she said: “I am German. I want to apologise for this war. I am so sorry. We destroyed your church.”

Well I just kissed her, didn’t I. And her husband threw his arms around me. The whole encounter couldn’t have lasted more than 30 seconds. But I’m not likely to forget it – ever – am I?

And it was this sense of people caring for one another, looking after one another, that was at the back of my mind through all this horrible business of rioting and looting here on my own doorstep. What I find most offensive, most destructive, is this media chatter about “communities”. You have the white community, the black community, the Muslim community, the gay community and, as once reported with unintended hilarity in The Independent newspaper a few years ago, “London’s sado-masochistic community”.

But the whole point about community is that it only makes sense if there is only one community. That’s what it means: community.

We are all together, for better or worse, for richer or poorer. When you start dividing up the population into these so called communities – Asian, black, white, gay, straight, sky-blue-pink-with-yellow-dots-on – you end up destroying the whole healthy notion of community by creating ghettos. When this was done most effectively in South Africa, people were rightly appalled and called it Apartheid. Why then are we prepared to let the same pernicious nonsense take reign here? It’s called multiculturalism and diversity and it is a disaster.

What we need to discover in our troubled times is a way of finding allegiance to one another, solidarity, fellow-feeling, what in its old fashioned way the New Testament calls brotherly love. We need to concentrate on those things that we have in common, rather than the things that divide us. It doesn’t mean that we have to agree about everything.

It doesn’t even mean that we have to agree about the most important things. You can be a Jew, your mate can be a Muslim and I can be an atheist. What matters is that we all see ourselves as one people in a particular place: and this is where we live. It is called England.

Anyone who reads this column knows that I am a dyed-in-the-wool Church of England Tory. But I am astounded and blessed by the friendships that I have made through this column with what, if I were in a bad mood, I might call uppity lefties.

The truly basic things about us do not vary very much: we eat, we drink, we sleep, we try to love our wives. These are realisations that ought to help us consolidate our affinities. A little bit of mutual sympathy is all I’m asking.

A little bit of forbearance. A little bit of forgiveness. A great bloody dollop of live and let live. It is better, surely, to live together than to die apart. Apart hate. Apartheid.