Newsline 11 April 2014

Newsline 11 April 2014

Newsline is a weekly round-up of news and opinion from the NSS website. If you're not already a member, becoming one is the most tangible way of supporting our work. Our campaigning is wholly supported by our members, people like you who share our belief that secularism is an essential element in promoting equality between all citizens. Please join today.

News, Blogs & Opinion

Faith school allocation may infringe human rights

News | Sun, 6th Apr 2014

Non-religious and Christian parents who have been allocated places for their children at a Sikh free school have argued that their right to educate their children according to their beliefs is being infringed.

A number of parents have contacted the National Secular Society after being allocated places at the controversial Khalsa Academy Secondary School in Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire, despite not including the school in their list of preferences.

Parents are now investigating the possibility of a human rights challenge. One parent told the NSS: "We're not a religious family so it's clearly inappropriate for our children to be educated at a school with an overtly religious ethos. We'll challenge this all the way."

Another parent said: "I am extremely upset and shocked. We are not a religious family, and yet I am being told I have to send my child to a faith school.

"How can I explain that to my child? Surely this is against the Human Rights Act to force a child to attend a faith school?"

The European Convention on Human Rights requires states to respect the right of parents' religious and philosophical convictions in respect of education and teaching. This aspect of the right is closely aligned to Article 9 of the Convention, which protects the right to freedom of religion and belief. It does not require the government to provide or subsidise any specific type of education.

Stephen Evans, campaigns manager at the National Secular Society, commented: "Leaving parents with no option other than to send their child to a school with an ethos entirely inconsistent with their own beliefs clearly fails to respect their right to have their religious and philosophical convictions respected.

"The best way to ensure everyone's rights are protected is to have inclusive schools that are equally welcoming to pupils regardless of their religion or belief background."

Mike Appleyard, cabinet member for education and skills at Buckinghamshire County Council said: "Buckinghamshire's 69 faith schools are treated in the same way as schools with no faith background. Parents who prefer their children not to attend a faith school are able to make a transfer appeal application to the independent appeal process."

All parents of children allocated places at Khalsa Academy against their wishes are believed to be submitting appeals.

Despite describing itself as an "inclusive school", Khalsa Academy claims to provide a "learning environment within which children learn about spirituality, faith and practice Sikh values." Panjabi and Sikh Studies are compulsory for all Sikh students, while non-Sikhs are separated to study an alternative modern foreign language. The school's 'Collective Worship' features prayers of a Sikh nature, and a religious questionnaire for parents wishing to send their child to the school makes clear that the school has "regular religious functions" in which families are expected to take part.

In a video on the school's website, Nick Singh Kandola, Chair of the school's board of Trustees, says "As Sikhs we believe this is a unique opportunity. This life time is given to us on earth to help those in need, to excel in ourselves and to find God – that's our purpose here and we want to teach children those core values."

The school offers exclusively vegetarian meals with parents not permitted to make packed lunches in order to stop meat, fish, or eggs being brought onto site, which is also regarded as a place of worship. However, the school's head has claimed in the local media that the school meals policy is simply based on trying to "encourage a healthy diet" rather than faith reasons.

The school, which opened as a free school in September 2013, has been the subject of a bitter dispute over where it should be sited.

Local campaigners argue that there is no need for a new school in the area and that the village lacks the infrastructure to cope with a large school. It is thought the majority of pupils attending the school will be bussed in from surrounding areas with higher proportions of Sikhs.

An application for the Khalsa Secondary Academy to stay at its Stoke Poges location beyond its current one-year agreement, which runs out in July, was rejected by South Bucks District Council in January. The Department for Education, which purchased the former office block and surrounding land for a reputed £4.5m, has now posted a new application with the Council.

Trevor Egleton, District Councillor for South Bucks, commented: "This application has been a travesty from the very beginning. The Department for Education have acted like the worst developer in the world, with every single aspect of what they are proposing in contravention of several national and local planning policies."

Parents that have been allocated places at the school have 20 school days from the notification date to submit their admissions appeals.

See also: Row as atheist pupils are sent to vegetarian Sikh school

Eric Pickles’ dictatorial disregard for the law is dangerous in a democracy

Opinion | Mon, 7th Apr 2014

Eric Pickles, the Dickensian-style Communities Minister, has announced that Britain is a "Christian nation" and anyone who disagrees needs to "get over it".

He has the usual easy pop at "militant atheists" and dismisses anyone who opposes what he does as "politically correct."

He also reportedly says that "I've stopped an attempt by militant atheists to ban councils having prayers at the start of meetings if they wish. Heaven forbid. We're a Christian nation. We have an established church. Get over it. And don't impose your politically correct intolerance on others."

He was referring, of course, to the National Secular Society's 2012 High Court case that ruled that it is illegal for local councils to include prayers as part of their official agenda.

After that decision, Mr Pickles rushed to bring forward by a few weeks the Localism Act and in doing so announced that councils could now keep prayers on their agenda if they want to.

There is no mention in the Localism Act of council prayers, nor was there any in the parliamentary debates leading up to it. And the Act was given Royal Assent long before the High Court judgment was issued.

In that case, the High Court ruling stands and Mr Pickles' contention that it doesn't has never been tested in court.

Mr Pickles' seems to be taking the Alice in Wonderland approach to the law, as to paraphrase Humpty Dumpty "the law means what I want it to mean".

The NSS has told Mr Pickles repeatedly that he is misrepresenting the facts of this case and yet he continues to do it. We never said that all prayers in Town Halls should be banned. We simply said that it shouldn't be part of official business so that everyone, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jew, atheist or anyone else - of whatever religion or non-religion - could serve on the council in good conscience and without intimidation.

Many councils now have prayers before the meeting agenda begins, and we have no objection to that.

Mr Pickles is entitled to be as enthusiastic an evangelical Christian as he wants to be, but we live in a democracy, not a theocracy. He cannot – as he has done – simply place his personal beliefs before the law.

The Big Society – to be run by churches - is Mr Cameron’s pipe dream

Opinion | Thu, 10th Apr 2014

First the Communities Minister and now the Prime Minister have declared Britain to be a "Christian nation".

In a speech to "faith leaders" gathered at Downing Street Mr Cameron said that his Government intended to see that religious groups play a much bigger role in influencing its policies.

But not only were there the usual platitudes about how marvellous church is for everybody, Mr Cameron actually started talking like a classic proselytiser of religion saying he wanted to imbue people with a "sense of evangelism".

In his speech he said: "People sometimes say, 'You talk about the big society, don't you realise this is what the church has been doing for decades ...Jesus invented the big society 2,000 years ago.' I just want to see more of it."

He told the gathered bishops, vicars and other pious persons of his churchgoing at St Mary Abbot's in Kensington where he "pops in" perhaps "every other week" for a spot of peace and quiet.

He mentioned his children. "I'm proud to be at a reception for Christians here in Downing Street and proud to be a Christian myself and proud to have my children at a church school."

He said that he sometimes set quizzes for his children over breakfast testing them on their knowledge of the gospels.

But Mr Cameron's personal religious inclinations are not what concern us. It's when he starts talking about involving the churches in policy-making and service provision that our hackles rise.

He said he wanted to make life easier for faith organisations that run services such as food banks. "I want to see the possibilities for that to expand." If they were "finding obstacles in their way", he urged faith leaders to think of him as a "giant dyno-rod in Whitehall. I want to make it easier to unblock the things you do."

Of course, we've heard all this before. At the same event in 2012 he said:

The domestic challenge is, and you'd be surprised if I didn't bring it up, the issue of the Big Society. I think there is enormous potential in churches and faith-based organisations to tackle some of the deepest problems we have in our society, whether it is educational and under-attainment, whether it is homelessness, whether it is mental health. Just wandering around the room chatting to some of you, I was talking to a lady who runs very important residential clinics for young people who have been self-harming or indeed have eating disorders – a classic example of someone of faith who has a great belief in wanting to do good, in wanting to change the world and we should be encourage those faith-based organisations into the solving of social problems.

And last year he said:

"This government does care about faith. It does care about the institutions of faith, and it does want you to stand up and oppose aggressive secularisation."

The Big Society is a long time coming and the churches and mosques and temples would be well advised to be very wary of what is being asked of them. They may want desperately to provide services for the needy and hungry, which they complain the Government is not doing, but they are not equipped for the job as the state is.

I'm sure Mr Cameron would be very pleased to palm off the difficult and expensive elements of the state's welfare remit – such as taking care of the elderly and disabled, the disadvantaged and the unfortunate. Let the compassionate churches do it. They're very good at that sort of thing.

Yes, indeed, they are. They have plenty of experience; they used to run the workhouses, the asylums and the Magdalene laundries. They would love to be able to force people to pray and go to church in order to receive services that the state provides universally without question.

Unlikely? They're already doing it – ask the countless parents who are forced unwillingly into church in order to get their children into a taxpayer-funded state school. What will it be like when they have hospitals, old folks' homes and nurseries under their control?

But if the state cannot afford to run these services, then the church certainly can't.

If the churches collude with the Government in reducing and eliminating services that many depend on, then they will have a lot to answer for. And when they have them under their control and the money runs out and the services disappear altogether, who will be to blame?

We don't have to look far to see what welfare services are like when they are "faith-based". In Germany the Catholic Church runs many of the welfare services at the state's expense. They are discriminatory, authoritarian and intolerant. Read this article for an idea of what it is like when religion becomes a powerful arm of the state.

And churches should note: when they are an arm of the state, they become answerable to the state.

Mr Cameron and his friends who declare that Britain is a Christian nation obviously don't read the statistics. If they think it will bring them electoral advantage, they should think again.

I have a feeling that the Big Society is no nearer now than it has ever been. The country doesn't want it, and it is unlikely ever to have it on the scale that Mr Cameron envisages or the churches hope for.

Poland partially revokes its ban on ritual animal slaughter

News | Fri, 4th Apr 2014

The Polish parliament has given in to worldwide pressure from Jewish and Muslim groups and revised its ban on ritual slaughter of animals without pre-stunning.

The Sejm (Polish parliament) made a statement in a position paper sent recently to the country's Constitutional Tribunal. It permits religious slaughter without stunning if the meat is for the consumption of local Jewish and Muslim communities only.

The ritual slaughter of animals carried out for economic or commercial reasons remains illegal.

The Constitutional Tribunal had ruled in 2012 that the Government was acting unconstitutionally by allowing Jews and Muslims to slaughter animals in this way without pre-stunning. An attempt by the Government in 2013 to reverse the ban was rejected by the Parliament.

Meanwhile, Denmark has come under intense pressure from Jewish groups over its ban on ritual slaughter without pre-stunning.

Agriculture and Food Minister Dan Jørgensen banned all slaughter without pre-stunning last month, although the importation of kosher and halal meat is still legal.

Jørgensen was quoted as saying that "animal rights come before religion," a statement he later denied having made during a meeting with Jewish and Muslim community leaders.

Now the Conference of European Rabbis has issued a strongly-worded condemnation of Denmark's ban, saying it is "a fig leaf intended to cover the country's woeful record on animal welfare."

Rabbi Menachem Margolin, president of the Rabbinical Center of Europe, another continental rabbinical organisation, pointed out that Denmark does not have laws banning humans having sex with animals. He said that the dichotomy between allowing sex with animals who cannot give consent and disallowing ancient religious traditions calls into question the sincerity of those who say that the ban is not anti-Semitic. "Those supporting the ban are hypocrites," he added.

Rabbi Yitzchock Loewenthal of Chabad of Denmark said: "As long as hunting and bestiality are allowed in Denmark, the ban against shechita is populist at best."

Rabbi Marc Schneier of the New- York based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, whose European representatives recently met with Jørgensen, called the ban "pathetic", stating that a country that "legalises animal brothels" and lacks "humane factory-farming standards" cannot claim the moral authority to ban shechita.

"This ban is nothing more than a political stunt to appease a growing far-right faction in Denmark," he said.

However, Ben Williamson of PETA UK – a leading animal welfare organisation - commended Denmark for its ban on ritual slaughter, which he termed one of the "least humane methods of slaughter."

John Blackwell, president-elect of the British Veterinary Association, also came under fire from religious groups last month by arguing that the ritual killing of poultry, sheep and cattle by cutting their throats causes unnecessary suffering to animals. He said that Britain's abattoirs should follow the Danish example.

Mr Blackwell said on the Radio 4 Today programme: "Our view has always been that animals should be stunned. They should be imperceptible to pain as death supervenes.

"We are looking for a meeting of minds to review the evidence base which clearly shows that slaughtering animals without stunning compromises welfare. If that can't happen then I would like labelling at the point of sale that gives the consumer informed choice. If that is not possible we would be looking for a ban for killing without stunning.

"There is no insensibility for these animals by cutting its throat and these remain conscious for seven seconds for sheep and two minutes for cattle and that is not acceptable. As a vet and scientist welfare is top of our list".

This led to Prime Minister David Cameron saying that ritual slaughter would never be banned in Britain during his term in office.

NSS Speaks Out

The Sunday Telegraph picked up our story about children from atheist and Christian families being allocated places at a Sikh state school and quoted our campaigns manager Stephen Evans. Stephen also discussed this issue on BBC 3 Counties Radio, and took part in a broader debate about faith schools on London Live, the capital's new TV station.

Terry Sanderson was on BBC Radio London on Sunday talking about the falling number of Christians in Britain. On Monday he was on Radio 4's PM programme talking to Eddie Mair about Eric Pickles' latest outburst about Britain being a "Christian country".

Keith Porteous Wood was quoted in a Times article (subscription) about new research into ritual slaughter that showed mis-stunning was far less common than religious lobby groups have claimed.