If you ask David Cameron what was wrong with Tony Blair’s time in power, he’ll tell you that Mr Blair created a new way of winning elections, one which was incredibly effective at getting a party into power, even when they’ve been tremendously unpopular in the past – particularly when they were in power! After winning the election, however, Cameron is on record many times saying he thinks Blair had no decent plan of action, no political purpose or set of well-defined ideas, and so he spent his first two terms in office unable to act.

Compare and contrast with those conspiracy theorists who believe that Tony Blair’s time in office has been simply as a pawn for some higher world power (Bilderbergers, Zionists/Crazy Jewish People, Giant Lizards, etc) and the strange thing is, both interpretations of events are just about justifiable and yet entirely mutually exclusive. In reality, the truth always seems to lay somewhere in between of the two1 – Blair was totally unprepared for power, but the various stalwarts of Westminster and their friends would have been more than happy to help him towards their own vested interests, in the form of ‘advice’.

Here’s where we see the roots of a conspiracy theory, though – the ability to draw more than one narrative out of the same set of events. Having been linked via Harry’s Place to a video on MEMRI titled Iranian TV Documentary Series Traces Zionist Themes in Western Movies: ‘Chicken Run’, I was left wondering if MEMRI was actually a middle eastern version of The Onion. But no. It isn’t. The thing is, as soon as you go looking for a conspiracy, there’s narratives there just waiting to jump out of the page at you. A remake of The Great Escape for children is a sinister thing if you are unaware of the cultural references that the film is making2. 

This feeling of a misdirected conspiracy theory is echoed in a highly entertaining Guardian article by the vicar of Putney, Giles Fraser. The Rev. Giles Fraser was asked to give a reading at a civil wedding ceremony, and came across the somewhat peculiar rule that all religious connotations are taboo at a civil ceremony. This secular ruling is one I came across at my wedding, since we were unable to use a number of readings that we like, and – though we did in the end have ‘Forever In My Life’ playing on the way out of the ceremony – much of the music of Prince was unavailable to us! So, after this vicar gave a tongue-in-cheek secular reading and walked away muttering about atheist conspiracies, he tried to write an article railing against these restrictions, and found:

But I had got this one all wrong. There is no secular plot – indeed, the truth is almost the reverse. In 2005, the government published a consultation document on proposed changes to the current guidelines. “The religious organisations who responded were unanimous that no readings from religious texts should be allowed, even if they did not directly refer to the deity.” The Catholic bishops were totally against allowing religious texts to be used. “Through secular use their particular religious meaningfulness can be diminished,” they argued.

So, the reason you can’t mention God in a civil ceremony is because the churches won’t allow it. If there is any control-freakery here, it is from church authorities acting as though the Bible were their property and that they alone have the wisdom and responsibility for interpreting God. Members of the public can’t be trusted to understand the Bible on their own or to use it respectfully. Just think – horror of horrors – what if a gay couple were to want a Bible reading at their civil partnership? Here, then, is the real scandal behind the prohibition of religious readings in civil ceremonies. It’s all about monopolising the divine. 

Of course, some of us are already aware how unhappy the church is about its increasing state of decline, making this less of a scandal, but this really hits upon the same thing – the beginnings of a conspiracy narrative, though nipped in the bud. Evidently the Reverend Giles Fraser is a man of understanding, and he ends up directing his irritation in the right place – towards the church. In so many cases, though, otherwise rational people are led towards railing against the wrong enemy thanks to incomplete or prejudiced information.

It all makes me wonder, however, if all the attention on the issue of civil liberties is being directed in the right place. Is an NHS database really being set up to allow the government to sell our medical records on to insurance agencies, or is it just in response to the people who say the NHS is broken and disorganised because your medical information isn’t available to your new doctor when you move to a new area.

Maybe, one day, we’ll find out.

  1. Probably closer to Cameron’s interpretation – he was there at the time and has never said a word about giant lizards, after all [↩]
  2. Speaking of hidden cultural references, just yesterday my daughter heard a sound she didn’t recognise, and asked me “Is it a bird?” I said no, and cracked up when she immediately came back with “Is it an aeroplane?” [↩]