HumanistLife

Archives for March 2017

The people who keep us safe

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Heroes are not the stuff of myth: they keep us safe each and every day

It’s normal when confronted by horrific events someplace in the world to feel a mixture of emotions. Grief, for the victims whose stories you have read about in the papers. Anger, for the fact that such a tragedy could be allowed to happen. Despair, that the world is in such a rotten state that such horrors can occur. Relief: that it didn’t happen to someone you love. Guilt, for thinking that.

Last week’s terror attack came closer to home, and for many these feelings were heightened. Among those, something else: fear. When the unthinkable happens, what do we do? In moments like these, it’s natural to feel hyper-aware of one’s own mortality and to think of all the people we cherish. We become aware of life’s fragility. We reflect on how important it is to tell the people we love that we love them.

This fragile, precious life is the only life we’ll ever have. It makes sense to make it count, and most of us will try our bests to lead positive, happy existences that do not cause harm to others. It is a sad fact of existence, however, that some people mean to cause harm. When they do, and when tragedy strikes, it is profoundly traumatic. It shakes us. And it brings home just how much we owe to those extraordinary people who put themselves in harm’s way to keep us safe, to keep us healthy, to keep us alive.

When the gunshots rang out at the Palace of Westminster last week, many people fled. But while police rushed passersby away from the scene, their colleagues ran towards the fray. Nearby hospital workers leapt from their posts… and ran towards the chaos. PC Keith Palmer, in the course of protecting civilians, was mercilessly stabbed to death by a fanatical Islamist and terrorist who had already murdered several others with his car that afternoon. We are moved by the heroism of Keith Palmer and all the emergency services workers, and by the incredible job they did that day, and do every day, to keep all of us safe. It is to their credit that the casualties of this terrible incident, though severe, were not so much greater.

Life is fragile. Life is short. Life can be lonely. It can be sad. And grief can seem too much to bear. But it is thanks to the everyday heroism of individuals like Keith Palmer that we are able to make so much of such short lives as we have. They afford us space to experience the very best of the human condition: things like love, happiness, fulfilment, the comforts of family. We all must realise that as human beings, our lives are inextricably linked. All of us must cherish those bonds, for they make us who we are and give us license to live our lives in the ways we choose. And this is just as true: we must remember, and pay tribute, to the brave individuals who make the good possible. Thank you.

Highlights from Young Humanists’ ‘ask me anything’ session with the co-founder of Faith to Faithless

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Young Humanists is the section of the BHA specifically for humanists aged 18-35. It runs a regular Twitter debate once a month using the hashtag #YHDebate. March’s debate took the form of an ‘ask me anything’ (AMA) with Imtiaz Shams, a BHA trustee who is also the co-founder of Faith to Faithless, which provides support and advice to people who experience discrimination, rejection, or abuse when leaving religion.

Below are a selection of the best questions from a number of young humanists and others in the general public. You can click on any tweet to see Imtiaz’s response.

https://twitter.com/LaurenNicholas2/status/839923433907572736

https://twitter.com/AlfredaEilo/status/839927853806419968

Make sure you join in for the next #YHDebate on twitter on 19 April, which will be on Humanism and conservatism (ooh).

The BHA isn’t always thought of for its campaigning on Relationships and Sex Education, but it should be

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As a charity that operates within the field of religion and belief, the BHA’s work on education issues tends to be associated most with its campaigning on ‘faith’ schools and against the various freedoms to discriminate along religious lines that they enjoy. What we are less well-known for, perhaps, is our decades of campaigning around the importance of personal, social, health, and economic education (PSHE) and relationships and education (RSE), and on the many benefits that making the subject compulsory in all schools would bring. For us, this is an issue no less important, and on which we have been no less active.

For the past few years, for instance, we have sat on the advisory group of the Sex Education Forum (SEF), helping to guide the wider movement that provides and campaigns for comprehensive, high-quality RSE. We are an active member of the Children’s Rights Alliance of England, and sat on the working group that drafted the education section of the Civil Society report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, again recommending statutory RSE in all types of school. And in recent months we have submitted evidence on the need for high-quality PSHE and RSE in schools to every official consultation on children’s rights and wellbeing, including to all five of the parliamentary committees whose subsequent recommendations to Government proved so pivotal in finally provoking action.

This is not to mention, of course, the landmark report we published earlier this year, Healthy, happy, safe? An investigation into how PSHE and SRE are inspected in English schools, which revealed that Ofsted has been ‘almost totally neglecting’ RSE and PSHE in school inspections. The report was vital in undermining the Government’s claim that statutory PSHE and RSE was unnecessary given that Ofsted is effectively guaranteeing that the subject is taught through its inspections – one less excuse for the Government to turn to in trying to quiet the increasingly noisy consensus.

Our attention in recent weeks, however, has been focused on Parliament, and specifically on seizing the opportunity to secure compulsory PSHE and RSE through an amendment to the Children and Social Work Bill. This is a move the Government itself has now made, of course, but if it seemed as though it did so with minimum fuss, that is because the headlines tend only to reflect what happens on stage, rather than what goes on behind the scenes.

There were no reports, for instance, of our appeal encouraging members of the public to write to their MPs in support of statutory RSE, nor of the hundreds of MPs who subsequently received emails from thousands of their constituents at the prompting of the BHA, the Sex Education Forum, the Terence Higgins Trust, and a host of others. There were no reports of our meetings with the Department for Education and with the opposition front bench the week before the Government finally published its proposals, nor of the meetings held with the MPs who ‘showed the way’ to Government in tabling their own amendments and securing support for them.

There also were no reports (unsurprisingly) of a website we set up with SEF to ‘track’ the views and voting intention of MPs should it come to a vote – a website that frustratingly never had the chance to launch in the midst of all the toing and froing between Parliament and Government. The website compiled the views of every MP on the subject of statutory status and presented all their public positions, showing in each case whether they were known to be supportive, hostile, or neither, and how close we were to reaching the tipping point of majority support. Unfortunately, the complex way in which Labour and Conservative backbench amendments evolved, prior to the Government finally coming on board, meant that the time never proved right to actually launch the website. But the threat of the site and the tracking exercise it entailed – systematically identifying dozens of Conservative MPs in particular who were speaking out in support – was hugely beneficial in applying private pressure on the Government to get things over the line.

From the ‘MP tracker’ website, showing which MPs support statutory SRE, didn’t support it, or whose views were unknown.

Last, but by no means least, there were no reports of the collaboration and coordination within the charity sector, which saw the BHA, Sex Education Forum, the PSHE Association, the Terrence Higgins Trust, the National Children’s Bureau, Barnardo’s, NSPCC, Stonewall, Girlguiding, End Violence Against Women, Plan UK, and others all working together. Without the joint work of this coalition, Whitehall’s dithering and prevarication on making RSE statutory would doubtless have continued.

This is not to say that the campaign is over, however. The Government is still to draw up the regulations and guidance that will dictate the nature of the RSE that schools must provide. The devil will be in the detail, and we have already voiced concerns about the Government’s promise that ‘faith schools will continue to be able to teach in accordance with the tenets of their faith’. If you’re wondering what this might mean in practice, you need only look to our previous work.

In 2013 we identified 46 schools which, in their RSE policies, either replicated section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 (which forbade local authorities from promoting homosexuality in schools), or stated that the law (which was repealed in 2003) was still in force. Similarly, just last year, through our blogging and whistleblowing website Faith Schoolers Anonymous, we revealed that the RSE policy of a Catholic secondary school in England stated that it ‘cannot approve of homosexual genital acts’, asserting that ‘a homosexual partnership and a heterosexual marriage can never be equated. And our same website has recently highlighted the many lies of the religious sex education movement, ranging from claims that the cervical cancer jab ‘gives young people another green light to be promiscuous’, to the assertion that children’s reproductive-health rights are ‘a euphemism for the “right” of children to engage in unlawful sexual intercourse, with confidential access to contraception and abortion.’

As ever, then, our campaigning must continue. And we’ll keep plugging away, both publicly and in private, to try to effect change in all schools, including those of a religious character.

No, the European Court of Justice has not banned headscarves in the workplace

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Contrary to what many newspapers reported, the ECJ did not permit or issue a ‘Muslim headscarf ban’

Headline after headline after headline yesterday, from across the political spectrum, erroneously reported that the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the top court of the European Union, has ruled that bans on Muslim headscarves in the workplace can be legal. But this is not accurate and such headlines risk causing a huge amount of acrimony if, for example, employers try to bring in such bans when in fact they don’t have the law on their side.

To be fair to the journalists who wrote all the headlines, the ECJ press release on the matter is very confused. It starts off by simply saying ‘An internal rule of an undertaking which prohibits the visible wearing of any political, philosophical or religious sign does not constitute direct discrimination’. But it doesn’t define anywhere what direct discrimination means, and doesn’t talk about its sibling, indirect discrimination, until well into page two – and when it does, it’s fairly muddled in the language it uses. We at the British Humanist Association had to read it through about three or four times before we got our heads round it.

So, let’s try and clear things up a bit. Essentially in equality and human rights law there are two types of discrimination. Direct discrimination, as it relates to religion or non-religious beliefs, is where you have a policy that targets someone because of their religion or belief.

Indirect discrimination is where you have a policy that does not target someone because of their religion or belief per se, but it nonetheless puts individuals of particular religions or beliefs at a disadvantage, when compared to those of other religions or beliefs.

Yesterday’s ruling actually focussed on two different cases – one from Belgium and one from France. In both cases, the employer had a policy of not allowing employees to wear religious dress or symbols. This led to two Muslim employees wearing the headscarf to be fired. They then took the cases through the domestic courts and finally up to the European court.

Neither employer’s policy was deemed to target Muslims specifically, so it was not found to be direct discrimination. That seems to me to be correct.

However, indirect discrimination is not always unlawful. It can in fact be lawful where the discriminatory requirement can be said to be a ‘genuine and determining occupational requirement, provided that the objective is legitimate and the requirement is proportionate.’

A clear example of this is a case heard at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in 2013, involving a nurse called Shirley Chaplin. She was wearing a cross around her neck, and her NHS Trust deemed that this posed a risk to her and patients’ safety in case ‘a disturbed patient might seize and pull the chain, thereby injuring herself or the applicant, or that the cross might swing forward and could, for example, come into contact with an open wound.’ Her Trust asked her to wear the cross on a pin instead. She refused and took a human rights case. She lost the case because it was found that her employer’s request that she wear the cross on a pin instead of a chain was a proportionate means of pursuing the legitimate objective of patient safety.

On the other hand, a case where an employer was found to have got it wrong was the case of Nadia Eweida, which was also determined at the ECtHR in 2013. She also wanted to wear a cross round her neck, and her employer, British Airways, said that this went against their uniform policy. This was deemed not to be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim and so her claim of indirect discrimination was successful.

In yesterday’s two cases the ECJ made no ruling as to indirect discrimination. It set out the tests by which the indirect discrimination could possibly be lawful. This included the problematic concept that it might be okay to require no religious symbols in customer-facing staff, which seems to me to go further than the ECtHR ruling with Eweida did (and, Darren Newman has argued, is less likely to be seen by European courts as okay in a UK than in a French/Belgian laïcité framework). But it did not rule on the matter. Instead it remitted the question of legality back to the Belgian and French courts to decide, and merely speculated about possibilities of moving staff to different roles.

These two cases were decided under the European Employment Directive, hence they went to the European Court of Justice, whereas the two cases from 2013 were decided under the European Convention on Human Rights and hence they went to the European Court of Human Rights. But the indirect discrimination law is essentially the same in both sets of courts. So I find it hard to see how, given the 2013 decisions, the Belgian and French courts will be able to do anything but uphold the indirect discrimination claim (or if they do, how, if it then goes back to the ECJ, it will be able to do anything but likewise).

And even if the eventual ruling is against a claim of indirect discrimination, the ECJ remains just one of two legal avenues open to these two employees – they can also take an ECtHR claim. And I can’t see how the ECtHR can rule in a different way here to how it did in the Eweida case.

Headlines saying the ECJ has allowed employers to ban headscarves are premature at best and completely wrong at worst.