Quintin Jardine's blog

My friends will tell you that I am a long way short of being a Christian fundamentalist. These days I’m only in churches for weddings and funerals. However, I believe that the right of worship is fundamental to all faiths and that it is intolerable that the right of access to any church, mosque, synagogue, etc,  should be blocked wilfully by any individual or group, whatever their cause.

That’s why I’m more than mildly appalled that St Paul’s Cathedral was closed to worshippers yesterday and remains closed today, because a crowd of  posh anarchists, sundry attention seekers,  and general toss-pots have chosen to mass around it in their silly little tents, for a reason which has nothing to do with God and is purely mammon-based. They seem to be trying to make their point by hi-jacking a symbolic building. But why St Paul’s? If they really want to draw attention to the focus of their campaign why aren’t they camped outside the equally iconic Bank of England, or better still Harrods?

The biggest ‘Why?’ of all of course is ‘Why are they still there?’ If they were parked outside the London Stock Exchange itself, just round the corner . . . and they do call their campaign ‘Occupy LSX’ . . . or outside one of those other institutions, they’d have been hosed off the street by now, you can be sure of that. So why are the Met treating them so leniently where they are? Do they think they have a right of sanctuary, or is the LSX more important than Jesus?