‘Disgraced Justin Welby and other bishops doesn’t deserve dignified retirements’

Someone once said: “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.” And that’s exactly what’s happened in the shocking sex abuse scandal that has rocked the Church of England this week.

Supposedly good men – and women – stood by and did nothing while the monstrous paedophile John Smyth, THE most prolific child abuser ever to be associated with the CofE, was allowed to carry on doing his evil work – and then escape to South Africa –because people who knew or suspected did nothing.

And the result of that cruel, wilful inaction is the Archbishop of Canterbury being kicked out of his job with 30 more clergy – four of them bishops – looking set to follow. And frankly, sacking’s too good for them.

They shouldn’t be allowed to slink quietly into the night after what they’ve done – or didn’t do. They shouldn’t be allowed graceful retirements, not when there are 130 men (once Smyth’s terrified child victims) whose lives have been forever ruined because Welby and his cowardly cohorts chose to protect the Church and their own positions over them. That’s evil isn’t it?

So what needs to happen now is that Justin Welby must lose his seat in the House of Lords. How can anything he says ever be taken seriously again? And if you need the measure of the man, It was only a week ago he arrogantly proclaimed he wouldn’t be resigning. “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought,” he said. “And, No, I’m not going to resign over this.” The implication being he didn’t think he’d done anything wrong and so shouldn’t have to.

Even days later in his resignation speech there was STILL no acknowledgment of his wrong doing.

As for all the others who stayed silent, they must be named, shamed and removed from the Church. It’s unthinkable that people like them – with no moral compass or Christian responsibility – should be preaching the word of God when their silence and the damage it’s done is indefensible and so damned unGodly.

I’ve written and talked a lot about the details of this scandal in recent days and the evil at the heart of it still shocks me to my core. How can people whose job it is to spread the word of God, to preach goodness and godliness, have sat on what they knew or suspected about Smyth, denying justice and peace to those poor abused boys.

And the Makin Report (which exposed this horror) says that’s exactly what happened. They knew or suspected but did nothing.

And what this scandal has blown out of the water is the presumption that men and women who wear dog collars and do God’s work are, at heart, good people. How can these people be if they knew or had heard about the stories of petrified young boys being so horrifically whipped and abused by Smythe that they bled so badly they had to wear nappies – and stayed silent.

Don’t tell me those are good people. They’re the antithesis of good!

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Sharon Osbourne says she can’t put on weight after coming off Ozempic. Sorry, I’m not buying it. Just looking at Sharon’s face tells me her problems are way bigger than coming off the drug she took to lose weight. She needs to confront those first – but she won’t as long as she can keep blaming Ozempic.

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Boots the chemist is in financial doo-doo having been forced to close 300 stores. So it was a strange decision by this ailing company to put out a Christmas ad that has angered and alienated huge swathes of customers.

It features actress Adjoa Andoh as Mrs Claus. She’s the lady you might remember caused national outrage when, during the Coronation, she said the Buckingham Place balcony looked “terribly white” which of course it would because the royal family IS white.

The story of the ad depicts a fat, white, lazy old Santa falling asleep on Christmas Eve and being rescued by Mrs Claus and her diverse staff made up of TikTok “elfuencers” and drag queens. Really?

Christmas is a time of tradition, it’s about celebrating the birth of Christ so why can’t we celebrate our traditions without always having to have messages about race, diversity and inclusivity rammed down our throats. Why does every event, every celebration have to have a woked-up, in-your-face narrative that much of Britain doesn’t believe in (I’m talking about gender ideology here).

A Boots spokesman said: ‘We always strive to create inclusive campaigns and we firmly stand against discrimination of any kind.” As do we all matey, but I thought inclusivity meant inclusive of everyone not just a minuscule percentage of the population.

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Why do Masterchef contestants say to Gregg Wallace, “Thanks chef”. The bloke isn’t and has never been a chef and a big part of his working life was as a warehouseman in New Covent Garden Fruit and Veg market.

Selling food (and eating lots of it) doesn’t make you a good judge of how skilled people are at cooking it, which is why I’ve never understood how Wallace ended up lording it over those whose culinary skills beat his into a cocked hat.

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Is Keir Starmer making a new version of Around The World in 80 Days? I only ask because, since September 1, he’s spent 22 days jet-setting around the world going to events that other world leaders didn’t think important enough to attend.

If this country is in the hellish state Starmer keeps telling us it is, why isn’t he here trying to sort it out instead of gadding off to places like Azerbaijan, Samoa and Brazil where he’s promoting his own status but achieving nothing for Britain?

Because what this looks like is a bloke who’s spent years in the shadows and is now determined to live out the role of international statesman and is gallivanting around the world on the taxpayers’ dollar trying to look important.

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Dogs are now racist in Wales, according to a bonkers new report (disgracefully funded by the Welsh government) from the environmental group Climate Cymru BAME, which wants dogs banned from the countryside.

One of its recommendations is to create “dog-free areas” in local green spaces to combat racism. Although the report doesn’t actually elaborate on how the dog-free zones would help inclusion and prevent racism.

It turns out someone compiling the report talked to “one black African female” – they must have looked hard to find her as the percentage of black people in Wales is just 0.9% of the population – who said she felt unsafe in the presence of dogs.

What, so all dogs should be banned because one black woman is a bit scared of them? No wonder Wales is skint and in a mess when the Labour Government there is wasting taxpayers’ money on claptrap like this!

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Jet2 had 79-year-old gran, Lily Ifield, arrested by Turkish armed cops because on the plane (to Bodrum) she refused to pay for what she called a “frozen tuna sandwich with mildew on it”, and she’d drunk booze she’d bought in duty free.

Okay, maybe Lily WAS playing up, maybe she was unpleasant to staff but she’s 79, needs a new knee and walks with a stick – how much disruption could she cause? And aren’t armed cops for a limping pensioner overkill? Jet2 need to find less extreme ways of dealing with tricksy passengers

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The Stasi-like hate crime investigation into brilliant journalist Allison Pearson is not only chilling, it’s a travesty that will resonate with tens of thousands of people all over Britain – people who have tweeted or said something someone else finds offensive and, before you can say “Free speech is dead”, the plods are at your door.

Allison wasn’t told what the year-old offensive tweet was and so had no chance of defending herself. What the hell kind of country is Britain becoming when someone with a grudge can scream “hate crime” and someone else is criminalised for it.

Luckily Allison and her newspaper have been able to fight back and expose the idiots at Essex police who did this. And FYI, the Force chief is a bloke called Ben-Julian Harrington who puts hate crime on a par with rape and child abuse, so you can see where this is coming from. But people with no clout or public profile are left terrorised and traumatised by stuff like this. It’s time the police went after burglars, shoplifters and violent criminals, not people expressing an opinion.