Keith’s Lobbying Diary

The NSS's Executive Director, KEITH PORTEOUS WOOD, tells of his activities in and around parliament this week

The right of older pupils to opt themselves out of Collective Worship and Religious Education in schools was debated again in the House of Lords on Monday.

The proposal was to extend to “pupils of sufficient maturity, intelligence and understanding” the right to opt themselves out of both Collective Worship and RE and also for the statutory rights of withdrawal to apply for the first time to academies.

Pupils would have already sat through around ten years of assemblies and RE lessons before attaining our proposed right for them to opt out themselves. Among the topics for debate were amendments suggested by the NSS seeking to build on our initiative in 2006 which succeeded in enabling sixth formers to opt themselves out of Collective Worship.

I was watching the reaction of Schools Minister, Lord Adonis, in the Chamber. He hurriedly asked his officials for a copy of the formal recommendation by the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights (JCHR), on which we were basing our request. It soon became clear, though, that he was not prepared to act on these recommendations, even though the JCHRC’s advice was that not to grant these pupil opt-outs would impinged on pupils’ Human Rights.

The Conservatives also opposed the measure, partly on practical grounds, and I have since proposed an alternative which would make the implementation of our proposals even more practical.

We gave notice of our intention to bring the amendments back at the next stage of the debate for reconsideration. Next time, we hope to have more support on hand in the House; this debate took place just before Parliament rose for its summer recess and many peers had already left.

The amendment was put down with a great deal of help from NSS Honorary Associate Dr Evan Harris MP (for which we are most grateful) and the amendments were jointly drafted by Evan and me. Baroness Walmsley of the Liberal Democrats kindly moved the amendment.

In response to the Government announcement of its intention to introduce a Single Equality Bill the Equality and Human Rights Commission presented the Commission's formal response to these proposals at an event for key stakeholders on Monday. The Vice President, Anna Behan, and I were invited to represent the NSS.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission's formal response document can be seen here

The response sets out what the Commission would like to see in the new Equality Bill, for example a complete overhaul of Britain's equality laws and a new contract with the public on fairness. This could be by placing power in the hands of citizens and not remote bureaucracies, and that people by local petition or referendum could test public services such as schools and hospitals on how fairly they treat the people who use them.

Both Anna and I directed probing questions about different aspects of publicly-funded faith based welfare and discrimination to the EHRC's head of strategy and to Trevor Philips. Noticeably, as soon as I raised the topic of faith based welfare, the reaction from the audience showed just how much opposition there is to it.

The issue was at the front of my mind because I had just come from another presentation about Government policy, this time by the Rt Hon Hazel Blears MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. She was launching her Department's "Face-to-Face and Side-by-Side: A framework for partnership in our multi faith society".

This document gives a disturbing insight into the Government's obsession with the so-called faith communities. It gives the impression that all religious activity is good and that religious people in the country do such disproportionate amounts of good work that they need to be uniquely cherished and encouraged, often with significant amounts of cash. The document gives sparse and token references to the efforts and energies of non-religious volunteers and community activists. We are really non-citizens as far as this document goes.

The stated justification for all this is that religion is an effective way to access hard to reach, and by implication, disadvantaged communities. Another clear intention is to fight extremism.

I have always maintained that those most likely to attend interfaith events such as these are not the people that the Government really needs to influence. I was shocked, therefore, to overhear a conversation at this launch along the lines of "I am not sure I understand Bin Laden's extremism, but you have to admire him standing up for what he believes in." The companion responded "absolutely". You couldn't make it up, and unfortunately we haven’t.

25 July 2008