Immigrants clog the NHS?

It especially annoys me when I read the "Immigrants clog up the NHS" claptrap. Old people in need of expensive, recurring and long term care clog up the NHS - people like me in fact. Immigrants are normally younger, therefore healthy, and make few demands. If you see many Asians in hospital they will usually be older, they'll usually have been here many years, they'll usually have paid their taxes and NI Contributions, and so on.

Being married to an immigrant, I may have an axe to grind, but not a few of my friends are immigrants, and none of them fit the stereotype. My wife certainly doesn't clog up the NHS, despite being in an older age group. She works for it, has suffered stress because of it, and conscientiously does her utmost to provide the best possible service to its customers. She is not alone in that.

Last time I was briefly in hospital, in the cardiac unit, there were no immigrants among the patients, and several among the nurses, all of whom did a great job. When I was on the table the cardiologist giving me the benefit of her expertise was an immigrant, and the consultant in the department is at least of Asian descent, whether he is himself an immigrant or not.

Persecution? WHAT?

Carey, former ABofC, says that UK Christians feel like a persecuted minority. Frankly that makes me sick. The Christian church knows what persecution feels like. It can recall persecution long ago in Ancient Rome, and persecution in more recent times in Stalin's Russia. To call what it now happening, namely a reminder from the secular world of human rights and a rejection of religious privilege and flummery, 'persecution' is a deep insult to those who really suffered for their faith.

It also displays a profound lack of historical perspective which amounts to ignorance. And it displays an arrogance which thinks it has a right to privilege in Government (such as automatic seats in the Upper Chamber and the right to be kow-towed to in certain issues) just because the rest of society thinks it is time to move on from 2000 year old moral prescriptions towards something more authentic and fit for the present day.

Unchanging doctrine?

Round about the year 50CE the church had to get together to resolve an serious argument among its leaders about what counted as it's teaching and what didn't. In the middle ages the pope changed the definition of the terrible sin of usury when he realised that they needed to benefit from capital investments. In 1633 the Roman Catholic church condemned Galileo for teaching that the Earth and the planets went round the Sun, which it finally recanted in 1992. For more than 1800 years the church did not blink at slavery, which is accepted throughout the bible, and which it now condemns. In 1930 the Church of England reversed it's position on contraception. When I was a clergyman I was not allowed to remarry divorced people. Since 2002 that changed (grudgingly).

So what is anyone doing saying that the church's doctrines come from God and cannot be changed? Even the central teachings about Jesus himself come from an argument between St Paul and James, Jesus' brother, which Paul happened to win. How can Mr Welby pretend to be holding the line on homosexuality when he must surely realise that history is against him? The same Church of England fought itself to a standstill in my time as a clergyman over the ordination of women, which it now accepts (although still resisted in some quarters), and is doing it again over women bishops.

Is there something that prevents the religious looking at their own history and learning from it?