Comment: The government that does “do” God
Wednesday, May 16th, 2007The man regarded as Tony Blair’s arch spin-doctor, press secretary Alistair Campbell, famously cut off a question to Blair about his Christianity with the words, “We do not do God.” Perhaps he did not want his PM to go off on one…? Either way, Blair’s subsequent actions contradicted the statement at every turn, from referring to God as his ultimate judge on Iraq, to promoting a virtually unknown MP, the controversial Opus Dei member Ruth Kelly, to the role of Education Secretary, to oversee the government’s steady drive toward putting religious instruction back into state schools.
Last week New Humanist’s Caspar Melville commented (”Hiding behind God“, via) on Tony Blair’s decade-long premiership:
No one has done more to bring the toxic certainties of religious belief back into politics and public culture and this has had nothing but a destructive influence on our hard-won secular settlement.
The most obvious example is perhaps Blair’s faith school agenda which has provided new legislation for, and actively encourages, religious “community groups” to take over schools through the Trust School partnership scheme and steep them in their religious “ethos”. The related City Academy program also “supplements” the supposed donations of religious “sponsors” — some of whom have not in fact put up any of their own cash at all, and all of whom pay at most just 5% of the cost of setting up the school and do not need to pay anything toward its maintenance. The “sponsor” then runs the very latest state schools with an accompanying mandate to foster their beliefs on pupils who, in a great majority of cases, have no choice but to attend those schools.
(The Government’s own Department for Education and Skills has refuted earlier claims from central government that faith schools had a certain “magic” that could be “bottled”, by reporting that the performance differential between faith schools and secular schools was entirely down to selection by aptitude. Sometimes this selection is inadvertent, sometimes it is intentional and covert.)
Melville concludes that:
Blair’s bowing to religious thinking and active support for the burgeoning of the faith industry in the political arena is having all kinds of negative consequences
and hopes that
whoever in the long term comes after Blair, has noticed that the British people don’t like preaching.
No such luck.
A couple from Powys, Wales, have been pursued by a church in Warwickshire for seventeen years under the auspices of an archaic law which holds them responsible to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds of church repair costs, despite the couple having nothing to do with the church in question.
