Here are four incidents reported from Britain in the course of a few days.

A foster mother has been struck off by a council after a teenage Muslim girl in her care became a Christian. The carer, who has looked after more than 80 children, said she was devastated: “This is my life. It is not just a job for me. It is a vocation. I love what I do. It is also my entire income. I am a single carer, so that is all I have to live on.” The foster mother said she had recently bought a larger car and had been renting a farmhouse, with a pony in a field, so that she could provide more disadvantaged children with a new life.

“That was always my dream. I am now in a one-bedroom flat.” The girl, now 17, is understood to be back with members of her family, who have not been told of her conversion. A second girl the woman was fostering has been moved to another carer. The woman insisted that, although she was a Christian, she had put no pressure on the girl, who was 16 at the time, to be baptised, but council officials allegedly accused her of failing to “respect and preserve’” the child’s faith and tried to persuade the girl to reconsider her decision.

Caroline Petrie, 45, a Christian nurse in Somerset, was suspended without pay for offering to pray for an elderly woman patient. She was reinstated only after thousands of complaints to the National Health Service.

School head Julia Robinson was forced to resign after replacing separate school assemblies for Muslim pupils with a single gathering for all faiths at which, it was claimed, hymns were sung.

A cricket team, the Middlesex Crusaders, who have played under the name for almost 10 years, have been forced to change their name to The Panthers because of the Christian associations of the word “Crusaders.”

One need not be paranoid to see that a deliberate and strategic war is being waged in Britain to destroy Christianity and Britain’s Christian identity.

The actual intelligence directing this war is not so easy to see. It will be noted that none of the agencies responsible for the above is directly part of the National government, elected at general elections and responsible to electors, whose Members sit in Parliament and comprise the Ministries and Cabinet. The political apparatchiks responsible for these and countless comparable acts inhabit not in the Parliament of Westminster but local authorities and quasi-Governmental agencies, hard to pin down, hard to call to account, and very hard indeed to tip out at elections. This is not to say the government has not condoned them—the Prime Minister or other ultimately-responsible Ministers could in each case have put a stop to it with a telephone call or word to their Departmental Head, but did not. Certainly the allegedly highly-religious (and now Catholic convert) Tony Blair did nothing that one could detect to stop such things—and there were already then thousands of such incidents—when he was Prime Minister.

Certainly, the links with the Government are there, but they are fudged and deniable. Shortly before Christmas a leading Labour Party-aligned think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, recommended that Christmas, if it cannot be obliterated, should be down-graded to promote multicultural-ism. The report says that because it would be hard to “expunge” Christmas from the national calendar (although this would apparently be desirable), public organizations must be made to give non-Christian religious festivals equal footing.

The Institute is not some pathetic relic of Communist days clinging to existence in a squalid slum attic. It has very close links with the government. The report was commissioned when Nick Pearce, now head of public policy in the Prime Minister’s Office, was its director. He was described in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s “Sunday Profile” recently as “One of the leading policy-makers in Great Britain.”

So far, while many people are plainly angry and protesting, much of the reaction seems to be bewilderment. “Political correctness gone mad!” is a description used beyond the point of cliché—but if it is madness it is a very clever, cunning and strategically-conscious madness. Britain, like Australia, had been a liberal Parliamentary democracy informed by Christian values for so long that many people do not seem to understand what is happening. As Kipling put it:

Ancient, effortless, ordered,

Cycle on cycle set,

Life so long untroubled

That Ye who inherit forget …

Australia has not gone as far as Britain in culture-war yet, but, as in Britain, those of us committed to democratic government, the rule of law and Christian values do not seem prepared to meet this challenge, or are thinking in outdated terms. This is not quite like anything our society has had to cope with before. We might do worse than to start taking seriously the boy-scout motto of Be Prepared.