Observations on Age of reason

Cher François-Marie,

Please come back. You spent two fruitful years in England nearly 300 years ago, and a healthy diet of Swift, Pope and Addison turned you into the satirist and ironist that made your pen-name, Voltaire, immortal.

We need you here again. Come back! The fonctionnaires and évêques of England are showing signs of irrationality so extreme that your Candide and Dr Pangloss would marvel. Two essays have been circulated by the civil servants of Whitehall - that wide street where the parliamentarians chopped off a king's head - which appear to be straight from Gulliver's travels. The first said that a man who married many women at the same time (against the law here, of course) could be rewarded for his later marriages from the public purse. For a valid polygamous marriage he and one spouse would be paid £92.80. For each additional spouse he would receive £33.65. (Worth far less than in your day, by the way.)

Alas, despite government generosity on this issue, it applies only to those of certain religions. Those of a different religion or no religion are not so blessed.

Otherwise, what bliss! I have many lady friends with names strange to your ears such as Jacqui, Hazel and Harriet. If I had married them one after the other I could have enjoyed the financial benefits of many wives simultaneously!

Meanwhile, another cabal of scribblers has written a proposal telling our ministers they must not use the world "Islamism". This word is used to describe, not the faith of Muslims, but the dangerous ideology of Islamists who seek to impose a way of life on all. But these government advisers believe that if ministers do not talk of Islamist ideology, it will simply go away! How useful to live in a world where forbidding a word banished the problem.

Now, our leading bishop has joined in. He suggests we could have two systems of law in the nation, one religious, one secular. But, since I am not a Muslim, I would not enjoy the benefits, if such there be, of living under sharia law. In your time, you argued against a king claiming the divine right to make law. Three centuries on, we are threatened with laws made by dispensers of divine rule.

We call the period you helped shape "the Enlightenment". Now our public servants are taking us towards an "endarkenment". Please, dear Voltaire, come back and save us from the repudiation of reason and the embrace of folly.

Yours, near despair,

Denis MacShane MP

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