Friday 23 December 2011

Warts And All

What is the Today programme coming to? Jerry Springer: The Opera aside, Stewart Lee is a very talented comedian. But his piece on Christmas and Cromwell, hardly my favourite historical character either, was a disgrace to Radio Four.

The Puritans believed, as some people such as the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland (not of Puritan origin - I remember Jenni Murray being thoroughly taken to task for suggesting to Alex Salmond that Puritanism was a Scottish phenomenon) still do believe, that the Lord's Day was not only the Christian Sabbath with everything that that entailed, but also the only Christian festival, being, as they saw it, the only one with a Scriptural warrant.

Cromwell was in no sense a progenitor of modern republicanism, as it calls itself, either. Marxist attempts to call his regime "the English Revolution" are perfectly preposterous. Come back on 30th January, the anniversary of the beheading of Charles I, for that one. Nor was America founded by the Puritans, really. But the continuing Puritan influence on all sorts of things deserves the proper Radio Four treatment. It certainly received no such thing this morning.

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