Just as you lot up North seem to be growing even more sane and sensible, we here in London are getting barmier by the minute.

You wisely blew a raspberry to Commissar Prescott's ambitions for a regional assembly, because you understand very well that people do not want more government but less. Politicians are a necessary evil and the less interfering from them and their schemes "to improve all our lives" the better.

There is a sign in the Aldersgate Road, just a half mile from my front door, and it says WELCOME TO ISLINGTON. One night I shall creep out under cover of darkness and preface those words with YOU'RE and stick an exclamation mark at the end.

Islington is, along with Camden, one of the great outposts of the Loony Left in this great city, and their latest act of mad malevolence is to ban a local school from calling itself St Mary Magdalene's - because the word "saint" would be offensive to Muslims, Jews, one-legged nonconformists with Albigensian pretensions and so on.

Of course, the whole point is that Muslims, Jews, noncoms and Albigensians don't mind in the slightest if a school names itself after that gorgeous, glorious Mary Magdalene.

A Muslim wrote to one newspaper this week to say that he was proud to have been educated at St Patrick's College in India. Another wrote from Australia and said that his nearest mosque is called St Mary's. Our problems are not with religious people but with secularists. No, let's stop all this pussyfooting about: and call them what they are - militant atheists.

These atheists have told us for the last 40 years that the world is going through an irreversible process of secularisation in which religion will be swept away. They are glad about this because they hate to see the practice of faith and they are too stupid and bigoted to see its value.

Moreover, the allegation that religion is dying is a lie. Religion is thriving in Africa and India. They are sending missionaries from Africa to Britain these days to return us to godly ways.

The Christian faith crucially helped bring down the communist regimes in eastern Europe. Religion and moral values were the biggest influences on the outcome of the US Presidential, Senate and House of Representatives elections. In Central America, Pentecostal Christian faith is transforming a society long beset by the evils of drugs and violent crime.

Atheism is thriving in northern Europe. This is the atheism that brought you filth TV in the name of liberation and anti-censorship laws; euthanasia; 190,000 abortions each year as a form of contraception; and the wholesale destruction of the family by its scorn for the institution of marriage and for its equalisation of all forms of sexual coupling. And which seeks to abolish what remain of the drugs laws and to turn the country into a debauched pandemonium of casinos.

Blessed Mary Magdalene, who didst wash the feet of the Saviour and dry them with thy hair and to whom much was forgive for much hast thou loved, look with mercy upon us, and even upon Islington, and restore in us the love of thy name.

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