This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

If you want to wreck the country, get some grandiose people to sit on a panel. Make sure you don’t choose anyone who disagrees with your aim. Then write a pamphlet demanding the destruction of something good, and call it a ‘report’.

And most of the media, especially the BBC, will oblige by treating your propaganda as if it is some sort of impartial study.

The latest example is from the self-proclaimed ‘Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life’, whose demands were published last week, masquerading as the conclusions of a balanced study.

Would you believe they want to make state schools even less Christian than they already are – accusing our many excellent Church schools of being ‘socially divisive’ and of promoting ‘segregation’ – and to revise the Coronation and services of remembrance to make them more inclusive?

Of course, there are luminaries of the poor, bewildered Church of England among this report’s ‘patrons’ and on its ‘steering group’. Its chairwoman is a jolly nice church-going baroness. But what purpose do they serve in such things? They do not necessarily stand for the established order, even if they belong to it.

This may be a clue: among those who paid for this ‘commission’ were the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, which until recently funded the rather militant Islamic rights group CAGE (about as far from a vicarage tea party as you can get) and the Open Society Foundations, backed by the ultra-liberal billionaire George Soros, a keen supporter of relaxing the drug laws.

Now, these modernisers have a point of view. I have a lot of time for atheists, humanists and members of other religions from my own. At least they’re interested in what seems to me, more and more, to be the most important question we face – what sort of universe is this? (Full disclosure: I am an old-fashioned Broad Church Anglican, 1662 Prayer Book, King James Bible and all.) But the idea that we should carry on adapting Britain and England to ideas and religions from elsewhere seems to me to be a mistake. All we have and are is based on the Christian faith, which has shaped law, government, morals, music, landscape and education here for a thousand years. Abandon it, and what holds up the trust which keeps us from chaos?

I accept that Christianity is dying fast in this country. I know that many schools teach religion badly, if at all, and that ignorance is everywhere. But there is more than one response to this. You could say, as this ‘report’ does, that we should accept that this isn’t a Christian country any more, and adapt it to become a sort of religious salad of all faiths and none.

You could give up trying to teach Christianity as a living faith, and instead get children to study it as a quaint, eccentric curiosity. Or – and the weeks around Christmas are a good time to say this – we could say that we still have a chance to rebuild and restore what has been lost.

Why do we so lack the confidence to do this, and readily abandon a heritage of such power and beauty, which has brought us so much good, for a multicultural wasteland in which a dozen competing faiths squabble in the ruins, and everyone else bows to the neon gods of consumerism?

Perhaps there is a multibillionaire out there somewhere who would fund a ‘commission’ that would be pretty much bound to come up with such a conclusion (I could pick the members). We could call the resulting propaganda a report. Then everyone would have to take it seriously.

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Donald Trump is a symptom, not a disease. The disease is the death of real political conservatism: a cool, intelligent reluctance to believe that all change is good, a love for the established, the particular and the well-worn.

During the 1980s, many people mistook Thatcherism and Reaganism, actually a wild form of liberalism, for conservatism. They lapped up the temporary riches it provided and now find themselves yearning for leaders to take them back to a world of secure jobs and secure borders.

Mr Trump, Olympically stupid and ignorant in many ways and virtually thoughtless, has the low feral cunning to spot this need and to pretend to meet it.

Of course, he hasn’t a clue how to go about it. But it’s not impossible that such a person will gain high office before long.

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Tom's spy trial reveals the secret that keeps us free

My friend Jason Rezaian, my guide and interpreter during a captivating visit to Persia some years ago, has now endured more than 500 days as the prisoner of Iran’s secret state, arrested on absurd charges, subjected to a closed trial of which we can know nothing and now sentenced to a secret punishment. Pray for him if you can. Think of him, unable to see the sky, at some moment of your free day, if you will.

I thought of his case, and of our own gradual erosion of justice here, as I watched the fine new film Bridge Of Spies, in which Tom Hanks plays a real-life lawyer who took on an unpopular case in Cold War America.

His client was the British-born Soviet spy known as Rudolf Abel (real name William Fisher). At the heart of the film is the contrast between Abel’s trial, basically orderly and restrained by the rule of law, and that of the American spy pilot Gary Powers in Moscow.

In the communist courtroom, there is no presumption of innocence, no jury, no true defence, just shouting prosecutors and an orchestrated crowd yelling its support for verdict and sentence.

In the end, this was what really divided the two sides in the Cold War, not the economic system or even the democracy (which wilts and dies where there is no rule of law).

It is what divides good societies from bad ones. Its absence from Iran has put my friend Jason in a nameless dungeon. It is an incredibly precious possession. I cannot understand why we care so little about it.

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This is all I’ll say about this because it seems to me the facts are so devastating. But in all three recent cases of dangerous public violence, yet again, mind-altering drugs are involved. Robert Dear, suspect in the killings in Colorado Springs, was a cannabis user. The flat of the culprits in the San Bernardino shooting, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, contained bottles of a benzodiazepine – whose ‘paradoxical reactions’ include rage, hostility, aggression and mania – plus amphetamines, which can produce delusions and paranoia. And the alleged culprit of the Leytonstone knife attack, Muhaydin Mire, was a normal young man until he started smoking cannabis, after which he became mentally ill. Please may we have an inquiry into this correlation?

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