Matthew Stevens

Harmless drudge and has-been, views are almost certainly my own.

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

@Capt_Kremin @MichaelTakeMP It's been demonstrated in recent years that "woke DEI" and old-style misogyny fit very well together, though the Labour Party's failure to elect a single woman leader while the Tories have had four suggests it has a special kind of issue with women all its own.

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

@IainDale The seven prime ministers between 1885-95 were Gladstone, Salisbury and Rosebery (Gladstone 3, Salisbury 3, Rosebery 1) so not seven in our sense of actually being seven.

[Jonathan Hinder MP @Jonathan_Hinder]

Blocking healthy children’s puberty is WRONG.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

She Pledged Palestinian Freedom From A West Bank Pulpit. She Has Never Made That Pledge For Nigeria's Massacred Christians.

On Sunday morning Dame Sarah Mullally, the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, stood in a church in Birzeit in the occupied West Bank and told the congregation she would use her role to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve. It was a specific, named, actionable commitment. A promise from the senior Christian voice in Britain to one community in one conflict.

Search for an equivalent promise made to Nigeria's Christians and you will not find it.

In 2024 alone, over 4,000 Christians were killed in Nigeria, the majority by Islamist Fulani militia and Boko Haram affiliates. The Open Doors World Watch List, the most comprehensive annual survey of Christian persecution globally, documents severe persecution across more than 50 countries. Iraq's Christian population has collapsed from 1.5 million before 2003 to fewer than 250,000 today, one of the most complete destructions of an ancient Christian community in recorded history. The Coptic Christians of Egypt face sustained institutional discrimination and periodic massacres. Sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing what some researchers describe as a slow motion genocide of Christian communities, conducted largely by Islamist groups, largely in silence.

Dame Sarah has not made a five day pilgrimage to stand with any of them. She has not stood at a pulpit in Kaduna or Cairo or Kirkuk and pledged to use her role to seek the freedom they deserve. The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, used his Christmas Day sermon at York Minster to say that Israel had committed genocidal acts. Neither Archbishop has used that language about the groups killing Christians in their thousands across Africa and the Middle East.

That asymmetry is not accidental. It reflects the ideological framework the Church of England has absorbed so completely that it can no longer see it operating. The same progressive institutional culture documented across British policing, the NHS, the BBC and the Ministry of Justice has captured the Church of England too. Its moral grammar has been rewritten. Suffering that fits the framework gets named, visited and pledged to. Suffering that does not fit the framework gets a footnote in an inaugural address that mentions Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of Congo alongside Ukraine and Russia, carefully balancing the optics without committing to anything specific.

This matters because the Archbishop of Canterbury is not merely a religious figure. She is in law and in cultural memory the senior Christian voice in a nation whose institutions, laws, liberties and moral inheritance were built on Christian foundations. When that voice makes its most specific and most actionable commitment, it is not to the 4,000 Nigerian Christians killed last year. It is not to the last 250,000 Christians clinging on in Iraq. It is not to the Coptic families burying their dead in Egypt. It is to the community whose cause resonates most comfortably in the progressive institutional culture the Church now inhabits.

Justin Welby resigned over catastrophic safeguarding failures. Dame Sarah was installed while live safeguarding complaints against her remained unresolved. Abuse survivors called it a galling betrayal. The Church pressed ahead. The institution that could not pause a ceremony for its own survivors has found the moral clarity to make a specific political commitment from a West Bank pulpit within weeks of taking office.

The Church of England once stood for something that transcended politics. It spoke for the persecuted, the forgotten and the voiceless regardless of whether their cause was fashionable. It does not do that now. It speaks for those whose suffering fits the approved narrative and stays carefully silent about the rest.

Nigeria's Christians are still waiting. They will keep waiting.

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

@miroirdufou @HTheCritical @jk_rowling That transvestite paraphilia and gender identity disorder have gone from tolerated abnormalities of personality to celebrated "identities" doesn't mean that value or purpose or knowledge have changed, but simply that the world has come close to losing its marbles.

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

@damekatydenise_ She's going for a young Rose West look, even got a pair of her specs from somewhere, brave and true!

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

Burnham could say that there should be a general election if/when his colleagues get rid of him, but not now.#wato

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

@PaulEmbery "Bray Syndrome" could be used to describe an extreme form of narcissism, when a delusional half-wit believes his mindless disruption plays an important part in historic public events. The actual insanity is that he's allowed to do it time after time.

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

@domdyer70 He also managed to lose leadership elections to Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, quite the achievement.

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

@hermionegingol1 Bloody hell, India Willoughby in women's prison!
She's not looking very happy though.

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

@PaulEmbery @SamBHodgson Theresa May was still formally PM on June 22 2019, so it would actually be "six PMs in seven years". Or should that be six PMs in ten years, taking account of her three years in office, but then there'd be Cameron, seven PMs in 16 years...

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

@JJBoy30_ @WitchyMcWitch If there's a "safety risk" for him in men's prison a cross-dressing man should avoid committing the crimes (often sexual ones against women and children) that cause him to end up there.

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

@AngelaTwomey4 @JChimirie66677 The problem with "X echo chambers" is that they're often right.

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

@JChimirie66677 @tweetingbrit If Starmer's angry enough he could honour his words from 2022 and call a general election himself, telling the King that he didn't think there should be an enforced change of prime minister without approval by the people.

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

@Lifeonwheels95 There is no equivalence between surgery to fix a very real physical problem and irreversible medical procedures claiming to alleviate psychological distress.

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

@OldRoberts953 I'm feeling a certain nostalgia for "my dad was a toolmaker" already. Pass the sick bag, Alice.

[Claire Coutinho @ClaireCoutinho]

The Government have quietly announced that they will push ahead with their Puberty Blocker Trial.

Children as young as 11 will be given drugs that can lead to loss of fertility and bone density.

No child can consent to this. The trial must be stopped.

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

@PastorSauceBoat I'm more "pedantic" about the misuse of the term genocide itself, or in other words aware of what it means.

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

Recall Starmer saying return the "sausages" instead of "hostages" in his 24 conference speech. Confirmation if needed that he wasn't cut out to be prime minister and wouldn't last that long.#bbcaq

[Matthew Stevens @Matthew1863]

@damekatydenise_ Enby genocide is literally happening, it just gets overlooked because trans genocide grabs all the headlines! Which is itself quite genocidal, when you think about it.