THEY all charged past the end of our street in a sort of dilapidated slouch. I mean of course the "schoolchildren" - or rather the yobs against the war, Saddam's scruffs.

When we usually think of schoolchildren, perhaps we imagine a nice young chap in a blazer and a cap, a well-mannered boy. Or a pretty, smart, grammatically-correct sweet thing with a melodious accent and a candy-striped dress. What we are seeing here every day is nothing like this. I'm asking you to conjecture a horde of the shouting, screaming, filthy, unkempt, foul-mouthed. Not according to any reasonable description known to man could these be regarded as what we all used to speak of affectionately as "schoolchildren".

Egged on no doubt by their hatred-convulsed teachers who despise what there is left of Western civilisation, this gang regularly shunts its way past the Old Bailey, along Newgate Street and right under our window. Now the first thing to be said about this mob is that they are "expressing their opinions". What, in God's name, are these opinions worth?

We are talking here about creatures who have difficulty writing their own names; creatures for whom the difference between "where" and "were" is a matter of the most abstruse perplexity; "beings" - if such may be ennobled by the metaphysical nominative - whose befuddlement in the face of the most ordinary working of the apostrophe in the English language is a matter so arcane that it might as well belong to the mysteries of Isis and Osiris. And we are being expected to believe that these half-brained, self-obsessed, sordid truants, are capable of the kind of mature political judgement that would tell us whether the war in Iraq is a moral cause or not.

A vast ignorant, unthinking, unfeeling barbarism is presently stalking this realm of England, and I want nothing to do with it. You switch on the wireless at your peril - and you hear that woman - what's she called, Sarah Montague? It doesn't matter. They are all the same, all the BBC women - and the men - indistinguishable, routine sardonic despisers of everything that we once valued. This morning, while our servicemen and women are locked in a terrible conflict, the Montague creature gaily announced that "cracks were beginning to appear" in the allied war strategy. Go home Ms Montague. Take a large beaker of Listerine and wash your mouth out.

Our beloved country is at war with a vicious and unprincipled enemy, a man who slices up his political opponents in a meat-shredder. We have got used to a decent set of political liberties in Britain and to the organisation of public life on the basis of Christian toleration and mutual respect. It is therefore hardly possible for any of us to comprehend the intense and deep perversity of Saddam's regime, the sheer extent of his cruelty. Well, that's his business and soon, through the skill and bravery of our servicemen and women, he will be disarmed and done away with. The least that we might hope for in the meantime is that those who have responsibility for the conduct of public life in Britain - schoolteachers, media commentators and the like - might give to our just cause the support which it deserves.

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