- Christianity, Islam and British Politics
- A lecture given at the UK Conservatism Conference
- Oxford Brookes University, Saturday, 26 November 2005
- Dr Alan C. Clifford
- BA, MLitt, PhD
A glut of highly significant secular and religious autumn anniversaries provides a stimulating context for my subject. Using more broadly the now-universal convention of identifying momentous events like New York’s ‘9/11’, Madrid’s ‘3/11’ and London’s ‘7/7’, I cite first some famous secular examples from more distant history. First, we may recall ‘10/14’, the Battle of Hastings, the last of four major invasions of the British Isles in a millennium by ‘Europeans’ – 1066 and all that, of course! Then, more positively in this bicentenary year, there’s ‘10/21’ when ‘Europe’ was on the receiving end of Lord Nelson’s decisive broadsides at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Not until 1940 was this country seriously threatened again by a foreign power. I pass by ‘10/25’ in 1415. Agincourt, Henry V and the savage nationalism of the Hundred Years War warrant national shame rather than pride. Indeed, driven by the power-hungry Plantagenets, the whole era has something of an ‘Iraq War whiff’ about it! Another noted ‘10/25’ was of course the distant Crimean Battle of Balaclava in 1854. Inglorious for the British High Command, the heroism of ‘the six hundred’ is justly celebrated. Stepping into November, and closer to home, we rightly remember annually the enormous costly sacrifice represented by ‘11/11’, the Armistice of 1918, when the four-year horror of the First World War came to an end.
