British Airways have finally backed down in the Great Cross Row Of 2006. I’m guessing that they decided that if even the Church of England thought it was safe to come out against them, they must really be in trouble.
Not to say that I don’t understand why companies are reluctant to have staff advertise their adherence to various worldviews, but in so far as BA is perfectly OK with their staff wearing Islamic regalia, Christians would be justified in feeling a little victimised (although, obviously, nervous travellers could be forgiven for worrying about the combination of Christians and air travel, what with the Jesus freaks flying into buildings so often).
In case you’re still wondering, BA’s excuse for allowing Islamopaths to parade round dressed as Bin Laden, while freaking over a cross the size of a 5p coin, is simply that crosses can be concealed while hijacker suits can’t. As excuses go, this makes ‘the dog ate my homework’ sound positively inspired. Doubtless, the Kool Aid drinkers are even now penning long essays to explain why this issue is very complex.
There are a couple of important points here. The first is that BA have been forced to back down by a genuine grass roots campaign. True, Labour pols soon jumped aboard the bandwagon, but – to put it mildly- these are the type of people who are not normally enraged by this sort of thing. Ditto, the MSM. Nope, it was a genuine sense of outrage amongst the public that forced BA to back down. We’d never have found out about the case in the first place without the resolution of Nadia Eweida herself (oh, and by the way Libs, taking on a massive multi-national that pays your mortgage is a hell of a lot closer to real courage than using an Arts Council grant to paint pictures of Bush as Hitler). Then there are the people who rallied to her cause. Folks like these guys and many others. No wimpy calls for government action there, nope, people simply decided that BA was not the type of company they wanted to deal with. So much for ‘political disengagement’ – the public are interested in politics, it's politicians they don't like.
That’s point two. While Nu Lab pols were taking mighty leaps onto the band wagon, you-know-who was conspicuous by his absence. Hey, wasn’t the whole excuse for Cameron his alleged political genius ? Here’s an easy score, but instead he’s stayed hiding in the closet, presumably so as to avoid alienating the ‘pro-discriminating against Christians’ demographic. See, we keep getting told that Cameron comes out with Liberal lunacy as a short-term political measure, but then when we get cases like this where BA’s behaviour is too outrageous even for Nu Lab, Cameron is still AWOL. It’s not the politics – Cameron really does see nothing wrong in discriminating against Christians. Yet Tories or no Tories, the Right won the argument. That’s the thing, the Tories aren’t just gutless, they’re also irrelevant.
Not to say that I don’t understand why companies are reluctant to have staff advertise their adherence to various worldviews, but in so far as BA is perfectly OK with their staff wearing Islamic regalia, Christians would be justified in feeling a little victimised (although, obviously, nervous travellers could be forgiven for worrying about the combination of Christians and air travel, what with the Jesus freaks flying into buildings so often).
In case you’re still wondering, BA’s excuse for allowing Islamopaths to parade round dressed as Bin Laden, while freaking over a cross the size of a 5p coin, is simply that crosses can be concealed while hijacker suits can’t. As excuses go, this makes ‘the dog ate my homework’ sound positively inspired. Doubtless, the Kool Aid drinkers are even now penning long essays to explain why this issue is very complex.
There are a couple of important points here. The first is that BA have been forced to back down by a genuine grass roots campaign. True, Labour pols soon jumped aboard the bandwagon, but – to put it mildly- these are the type of people who are not normally enraged by this sort of thing. Ditto, the MSM. Nope, it was a genuine sense of outrage amongst the public that forced BA to back down. We’d never have found out about the case in the first place without the resolution of Nadia Eweida herself (oh, and by the way Libs, taking on a massive multi-national that pays your mortgage is a hell of a lot closer to real courage than using an Arts Council grant to paint pictures of Bush as Hitler). Then there are the people who rallied to her cause. Folks like these guys and many others. No wimpy calls for government action there, nope, people simply decided that BA was not the type of company they wanted to deal with. So much for ‘political disengagement’ – the public are interested in politics, it's politicians they don't like.
That’s point two. While Nu Lab pols were taking mighty leaps onto the band wagon, you-know-who was conspicuous by his absence. Hey, wasn’t the whole excuse for Cameron his alleged political genius ? Here’s an easy score, but instead he’s stayed hiding in the closet, presumably so as to avoid alienating the ‘pro-discriminating against Christians’ demographic. See, we keep getting told that Cameron comes out with Liberal lunacy as a short-term political measure, but then when we get cases like this where BA’s behaviour is too outrageous even for Nu Lab, Cameron is still AWOL. It’s not the politics – Cameron really does see nothing wrong in discriminating against Christians. Yet Tories or no Tories, the Right won the argument. That’s the thing, the Tories aren’t just gutless, they’re also irrelevant.
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