THERE ARE few certainties in modern Britain. Even the biennial Ashes thrashing is now a thing of the past. There is, however, one tradition on which we can still rely: regular outpourings of Western self-hatred and the appeasement of tyrants from the Church of England.

The latest example is a report by a group of bishops led by the Bishop of Oxford. According to the authors, the bishopric should conduct a “public act of repentance” for the war in Iraq.

Bishop Harries is, with his co-authors, a longstanding critic of the war and thus opposed the removal of Saddam from day one. And there would be nothing surprising about such an anti-war campaigner using the troubles in Iraq to argue the supposed folly of the military action. Bishop Harries’s soulmate George Galloway does it every day.

What lifts their latest sally into the realms of the grotesque, however, is the elaboration of his proposal that the bishop gave on yesterday’s Today programme. The apology, he argued, should come only “if and when there is a stable democracy” in Iraq.

In the minds of Bishop Harries and his crew, even the liberation of the Iraqi people from tyranny into democracy would still be a shameful act.

There sounds the true voice of the clergy. Forget all the sophistic arguments about the war acting as a recruiting ground for terror or concern about the terrorists’ victims. The real problem is the very fact of “deeply flawed” Western democracies (as they put it) taking action against tyranny.

Worse still — yes, you knew it was coming, and here it is — it was America that led the way. So consumed are they with hatred for America that they consider Saddam to be preferable to democracy, if it has been facilitated by America. In a passage of breathtakingly blinkered bigotry, we are told that “what distinguishes it (the US) from many other empires in history is its strong sense of moral righteousness”.

No. What distinguishes America is that when it fights it does so not to impose tyranny but to promote freedom and the stable democracy of which the bishops are so contemptuous. Without America sending its sons to fight for liberty, we would be speaking German. But in the minds of the clergy, when the choice is between tyranny and freedom, the latter does not even deserve a thought.