Silly Buggers and Silly FOCAs

I was not amazed at the story which emerged recently of the News of the World allegedly using snooping agencies to try and tape the voicemails of the rich and famous. After all, there was a court case about it a while ago now, and someone even went to jail as a result. Whether he was the right person of course is a moot point, given the wider prevalence of the practice now being suggested. It was not even surprising that the practice was more widespread. After all, the speed and ease of modern digital communications has made mass e-mailings and mass SMS-texting a reality. No, what amazed me is that allegedly the police knew all about it and did nothing! I am not a lawyer, but I would have thought that snooping on someone else’s voicemail must contravene some statute or other, even if it is only the Data Protection Act, which local authorities and call centres are so fond of quoting whenever they want to get out of actually being helpful.

I am not surprised, either, that the News of the World – if they did it, which is still unproven – actually got away with it. In general, the tabloid press in the UK has an incredible power, frequently misused. Their constant mixture of dirty tricks and surveillance with “celebrity” news and gossip makes for the worst of both worlds and risks eventually bring down a draconian “privacy law” on the heads of all the media, which will prevent even legitimate investigation of stories which are in the public interest. To a certain extent, we get the press we deserve, or so runs the well-rehearsed argument. But I am not so sure that the tail does not wag the dog. After all, it’s not as if there is any real choice of an alternative media to peruse and choose instead, for those of us who don’t want salacious red-top tittle-tattle about who is currently going to be evicted from the Big Brother House.

I would love to hear the excuse used by the police for not pursuing this, and I look forward to a successful private prosecution opening the floodgates for many more of the same.
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I wonder if any of those allegedly bugged by the News of the World’s agents were bishops? Specifically, I wonder if they were the bishops who seem unusually exercised by the word “bugger” in alternative connotations. I refer of course to the Fellowship of Committed Anglicans, or FOCA for short, the hard-line faction within the Church of England who have set out to challenge the authority of Rowan Williams by “upholding” “traditional” Anglican values (such as being anti-Gay). This of course is just what we need in the world today – yet more gay-bashing religious fundamentalism. As if the Taliban were not enough! What really irks me about these people is not so much their fundamentalist views – they are, after all, entitled to their opinions, however loopy. It is the fact that the whole “are gays OK by God” argument (and its offshoot on women bishops) is so massively irrelevant.

I don’t know what it is that gives FOCA the right to assume they are more “committed” than any other Anglican (unless the “committed is taken in the legal sense and they have all been getting pissed on communion wine or fondling choirboys); and in any case, the idea of an Anglican fundamentalist doesn’t exactly conjure up visions of suicide vests. If an Anglican were really angry with you, he might serve you sweet sherry instead of dry.

But FOCA should wake up and smell the coffee. There are lots of problems they could be bending their not inconsiderable traditionalist talents towards the slowing of: for a start, not many people actually go to church any more. Then there’s all those people dying of hunger, lack of clean water and disease. Oh, and the odd war needing sorting out as well. Tell you what, FOCA, here’s the deal. Let’s get all that sorted out and when it’s done and dusted, and churches up and down the land are rammed to the rafters with throngs of happy worshipers, then we can have an international conference, somewhere warm and sunny if you like, to decide whether or not Leviticus says it’s OK for gays to dance on the head of a pin, or what the original Aramaic text of the Apocryphal Book of Spartacus has to say about women bishops and whether they can only move diagonally. Can’t say fairer than that, can we? Or, failing that, bugger off and let these other committed Anglicans sort things out without you sniping from the wings.