Allen Coote also branded a subsequent concession by leaders to permit him up to 30-minutes speaking time outside the landmark per-week as “unreasonable”.
The 55-year-old from east London told Premier’s News Hour: “I can’t see why there was a problem.
“Nobody [members of the public] actually complained.
“I’m not sure why they wanted to take action on me but I felt it was right for me to read the Bible and I’ve been doing it since.”
The cathedral responded by saying it had a policy of limiting any “source of disturbance” outside its doors, in order to offer visitors a “welcoming space”.
It said in a statement: “The Chapter’s policy is to allow a short interval and then ask the person to stop, and to involve the police if they refuse to do so or to move off the Cathedral’s land.
“The police are supportive of this policy and on one occasion briefly arrested a man who regularly returned to read loudly passages from the Bible because he was refusing to respond to polite requests from Cathedral staff to move on.
“After this incident, the man concerned had a meeting with one of the Cathedral clergy, following which Chapter agreed to suspend its policy for this particular person so that he could read the Bible, as he requested, for half an hour outside the Cathedral once a week.”
Coote, who is a full-time bus driver, says his treatment contradicts the Epistle Dedicatory – a…
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