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About Andrew Copson

Andrew Copson is the Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association.

Offended? That’s the price of freedom.

November 4, 2016 by Andrew Copson

Photo: Jennifer Moo

Photo: Jennifer Moo

In 2008, the blasphemy laws were abolished in England and Wales. They protected the tender sympathies of the Anglican God against any insults whether spoken in public or written. Relics of a more theocratic age, their eventual abolition may have seemed inevitable, but in practice many organisations and individuals had to campaign hard for it for many decades. Real change was anything but a foregone conclusion: at the same time as the case was being made for progressive reforms, there were those pushing not for the abolition of blasphemy laws, but for their extension.

These calls went back to 1989 when the then Archbishop of Canterbury had called for the blasphemy laws be extended to criminalise offences against Islam. This was in the context of the violent street reaction to Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, stoked by the incendiary rhetoric of the Ayatollah Khomeini, which left many dead around the world. He didn’t get his way, but perhaps the Archbishop needn’t have bothered, as it seems that criticism or mockery of religion is now being censured by many public bodies of their own free will, and a social climate prevails which allows this to happen.

The last few years have seen many examples of religion being made immune from criticism or mockery in our public spaces, especially in universities, where student union authorities have played the role of heavy-handed thought police. In University College London, the humanist society was sanctioned by the authorities for using a cartoon of Jesus and Mohammed at a bar to advertise their sociable events. That same week, a humanist society talk at Queen Mary’s was cancelled due to death threats. A week later, at LSE, students were censured over ‘Jesus and Mo’ cartoons, and excluded from their own fresher’s fair a year later over T-shirts. At London South Bank, it was for using Christian imagery of the creation of Adam the advertise their drinks. And at Warwick, it was for using a cartoon of a stick man throwing religious symbols like crosses into a bin. Similar incidents, ranging from the troublingly absurd to the decidedly threatening, have taken place at Goldsmiths, Reading, and on many other campuses around England.

The latest victim of course is four-time Olympic medallist Louis Smith, forced to apologise and banned by British Gymnastics for enjoying a silly joke at the expense of religious practices which many people find ridiculous, and, in the course of doing so, offending those who would prefer to see religious ideas protected from scrutiny. Conceding to those demands sets us on a worrying course.

Absurd though we may think them, religions are big and powerful ideas. Many people think they are not just absurd but malign: barriers to human intellectual and moral progress. Whatever we think of them, in the history of Europe almost all social progress has come from criticising – yes, and ridiculing – their ideas and practices. All the benefits of free thought and free speech that we enjoy in Britain today come as a result of overturning their control.

In 2016, close to 70 countries have real blasphemy laws in statute. 43 of these treat it as an imprisonable offence, and in six others it is a crime punished with torture or the death sentence. The countries that actually enforce these rules are not places where you would want to live. The laws create a totalitarian atmosphere where people are so unfree that many live out the entirety of their lives never speaking their true thoughts, even to their closest friends and family. I have met many emigrants from Saudi Arabia in particular for whom this was true, but it is a pattern true of any country where the price of freedom is mortally high. Conform, be silent, never speak your mind. The alternative is to give up your liberty, your health, or even your life.

In our liberal democratic society, public authorities have a duty to protect and advance human rights, including our right to freedom of expression. They should not be victimising individuals for lawful actions, however offensive. Individuals, of course, have other obligations, and will keep their own conscience. We may exercise self-restraint in our own expressions out of politeness or respect. We may even urge others to do the same. But we should never call on the law to enforce our personal values or tastes, however deeply held these may be.

We have all had our most cherished beliefs, identities, or ways of life subject to ridicule at one time or another. When we feel that way, we have a choice. Our duty as citizens in a liberal society is to either engage with our detractors and attempt to persuade them to our way of thinking, or to shrug and ignore it. And then we get on with our lives, accepting that the discomfort we feel is a very small price to pay for freedom.

Filed Under: Comment, Culture, Politics Tagged With: Blasphemy, blasphemy law, british gymnastics, campus censorship, free speech, louis smith, olympics

Support for humanist marriage is broad and overwhelming – so why is the Government delaying?

December 10, 2014 by Andrew Copson

As the Government continues to delay reporting on the legalisation of humanist marriages, we are seeing increased expressions of the political consensus in favour of it. Two dozen members of the House of Commons today have signed an Early Day Motion to urge the Government to move towards legalisation. They already include MPs from Labour, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, Green, Conservative, and even SNP making a rare venture into English and Welsh matters. They include Christians as well as humanists, and there are more signatories to come.

1

This is a follow-up to a triple cross-party strike from a Labour, a Liberal Democrat, and Conservative MP on 11 November, who pressed the justice minister from three corners of the chamber as to what was taking the Government (which had originally told the British Humanist Association that the whole issue might be taken care of by about eight months ago!) quite so long:

2

And on 4 December the Labour front bench, who were forced to compromise on humanist marriage at the time of the Marriage Bill last year when the Government threatened to delay same-sex marriage if the case for humanist marriage was taken to a vote, were showing their frustration:

3

And it’s not just in the Commons. Last week, on 1 December, there was a mini-debate in the House of Lords in which there was not a single voice raised against humanist marriage and in which, again, there was cross-party support from Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat, as well as independent peers. Again, support crossed belief lines with Christians such as cross-bencher Baroness Butler-Sloss also urging the Government to get on with legalisation. She and Baroness Thornton got pretty much as forthrightly critical of the Government as it is possible to be in the polite atmosphere of the Lords:

4

Unfortunately, it does seem that the Government is just not listening. Even when the subject was raised directly with the Prime Minister by an MP of his own party at Prime Minister’s Questions on 19 November, there was no answer forthcoming on the substantive matter of humanist marriage, just the same ‘wait and see’ response, while Parliamentary time between now and the next general election bleeds away:

5

When the Marriage Act was going through Parliament, it was clear that there was majority support for the legalisation of humanist marriages in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The British Humanist Association, though obviously much much smaller and poorer than the wealthier and more powerful lobbies against humanist marriages, at least was able to make its arguments and expose the disingenuous ones of critics in the light of day. Now that the matter is being considered behind closed doors, there is no such opportunity.

All that can be done is to state yet again the case for legal recognition, against which no coherent or just case has ever to this date been made.

In England and Wales, members of literally dozens of religions from Scientology to Methodism and from all the denominations of Judaism to the Spiritualists and the Aetherius Society (Yes – honestly!) can all have a legal marriage in the place most special to them, conducted by one who shares their beliefs, and in the form that embodies their most deeply held beliefs and values. Those with humanist, non-religious beliefs and values don’t have the same choice.

In Scotland, where humanist marriages are legal, they have proved hugely popular – so popular that they have contributed to a growth in marriages overall. Giving legal recognition to them in the whole of Britain would be fair, inexpensive, easy, uncontroversial, and beneficial for both individuals, wider society, and the economy. What can possibly be being discussed behind closed doors that weighs against all that?

Filed Under: Ceremonies, Humanism, Politics Tagged With: humanist marriage

The cost of failing to address the place of religion in our schools

June 11, 2014 by Andrew Copson

At last Ofsted and the Education Funding Agency have published their investigations into the ethos and curriculum of a number of Birmingham community schools. For the last few years many organisations, including the British Humanist Association (BHA), have been receiving reports from staff and parents at one or other of these schools outlining their concerns. These allegations have included gender discrimination, homophobia, creationism, discrimination in employment and disciplinary practices, bullying, and an unbalanced and closed curriculum, many of which have now been validated.

When we received them at the BHA and had permission, we passed them on to the Department for Education (DfE) and Ofsted, but it is questionable whether these legitimate concerns would ever have been taken seriously had it not been for the appearance of the ‘Operation Trojan Horse’ letter in March. This letter, now widely considered to be a hoax, gave rise both to investigations of a conspiracy to advance Islamic extremism and to a vicious public debate.

I think focusing on conspiracy and on violent or political extremism are distractions. What many of those who first blew the whistle in the various schools were reacting to was not these claims but to the teaching and ethos of community state schools being gradually changed to reflect a distinctive and narrow religious position, with a closing down of alternative ways of looking at the world, in a way that made the school an extension of the most religious home and denied the pupils alternative views. The most important issue within the situation in Birmingham remains that children in state schools were given an education that may have prepared them well for exams and formal academic achievement but did not open their horizons, develop their freedom of belief, and equip them as informed and critical citizens of modern society to the extent that we should expect.

The specific findings of unbalanced religious teaching and worship and narrow curricula in a number of disciplines in these cases are deeply shocking, but they are a symptom of underlying problems in a school system based on a general religious bias which is increasingly in tension with our more secular and plural society and where the antique provisions embedding religion in the nature even of our non-religious schools are giving rise to a range of perverse outcomes. The situation in Birmingham is symptomatic of our failure to face up to the consequences of these issues still being governed by a basic framework that is now seventy years old and this is a failure of successive governments, none of which have had an overarching strategy or a principled vision of how the state education system should deal with religion or belief.

The last serious attempt to look at all the issues holistically was in 2002 when the BHA published A Better Way Forward. It was the product of policy work and consultation with a range of religious groups as well as educationists and although its proposals may now look dated in a heavily reformed school system, the issues it engaged with are the same. The message was, and still is, simple: all state schools should be equally inclusive of all pupils and staff, with no one group being given special privileges. Schools should not proselytise or discriminate against anyone on the basis of their religion or belief, in admissions, employment, curriculum, ethos, or assemblies.

There are a number of ways in which our law and practice falls short of this: it allows religious discrimination in admissions and employment; it mandates daily acts of religious worship in all schools; it allows unbalanced confessional RE in many schools and makes minimal national prescription in relation to RE in most others, leaving decisions up to schools; beyond bare bones equality law, it fails to lay out any clear template for how schools can or should be made inclusive of children from different religious or belief backgrounds. When you look at them as a package, these facts are astonishing. Not only do they put our school system’s relation to religion way outside of clear international standards and the norms of other liberal democracies, they fail to respect the human rights of children to a horizon-widening education and they fail to recognise the necessity of inclusive civic institutions in a plural society. When combined with the increasingly consumerist approach to public services and our assumption that in schools it is the parent who is the consumer and not the developing child, the fact that the place of religion is so prominent in our school system can lead to people implementing outrageous policies while thinking them entirely acceptable and in keeping with our national provision.

If so many state schools continue to be allowed by law to select the children of Christians, of course Muslim parents and groups will make demands for theirs too. Few people are such policy nerds that they really understand different legal school types, so of course this desire will inevitably translate into influence over schools with no religious character but where most pupils are from Muslim backgrounds. Why shouldn’t a state school with a majority of Muslim parents have compulsory Muslim worship every day?  The law of the land encourages and allows it. And why should alternative activities be provided for children whose parents opt them out? They aren’t in the many schools where the worship is Christian and the potential opters-out are Muslim (or Hindu, or Jewish, or humanist…)

Why shouldn’t a school with children whose parents are mostly Muslim have imams coming in to talk regularly? Schools where most of the parents are Christians (and many where they aren’t) have vicars visiting frequently. Why shouldn’t RE lessons in schools with mostly Muslim parents be mostly about Islam and exclude non-religious beliefs? There’s nothing in the law to rule it out and in many other schools the lessons are mostly about Christianity, even confessionally so, and don’t include teaching about non-religious beliefs at all.

To me the answer is clear – it is because children have the right to a broad and open education tailored to their development as a whole person. No school should be prioritising religious identities over the need for inclusion in our civic institutions. If you agree with me, then surely you would extend the same principle to all state schools. And if so, surely the fact that these principles don’t currently extend in all these ways is the real issue underlying the present problems?

If this is the issue, that what is it that governments have been doing that has allowed this situation to continue? Haven’t they done anything to try to address it?

The Labour governments of 1997-2010 were culpable of engineering the biggest expansion of religious state schools in British history and in legislating to remove employment rights from many staff in these schools. But successive secretaries of state did work to address some of the issues of religion in the system in a more helpful direction – though always stopping short of complete reform. Charles Clarke introduced a national framework for a more balanced subject of RE in all schools – but he failed to make it compulsory. Alan Johnson introduced a duty to promote community cohesion on all schools, including in relation to religion – but failed to change the law allowing religious discrimination in admissions to many schools. Ed Balls introduced new guidance on RE and new resources for school assemblies that effectively replaced compulsory worship in many schools – but he didn’t change the underlying law on RE, he didn’t seek to remove the right of many schools to teach single religious instruction, and he left the law requiring worship on the statute books where it remained in force.

The current coalition government also has a mixed report card, and has similarly failed to treat issues of religion in our education system holistically. It has introduced a quota of pupils from different belief backgrounds in most new religious selective state schools – but it still allows such selection in other schools and has abolished the inspection of community cohesion. It has made provisions for no new school to be able to have pseudoscientific teaching, but has attenuated the regime of accountability to the extent that this is hard to enforce. It has given support to an inclusive new framework for RE but failed to make it compulsory. It has removed many inclusive provisions from subjects such as History, Citizenship, and others, and diluted the applicability of the national curriculum in any case. In its ‘freeing up’ of academies and free schools it has singularly failed to free them of the requirement to hold daily religious worship, which remains in force for all of them.

To seek to address the issue of religion and belief in our schools holistically is not to attempt to hijack the current debate – it is to debate what the real underlying issue is. In the Commons debate on Monday, Michael Gove did not see it this way. He preferred to focus on Britishness and inspection regime reforms – but the shadow education secretary did open up the issue. Perhaps like Labour secretaries of state before him, he might engage more seriously with it. Perhaps he might go further and address it in a genuinely holistic way. Surely he, or our current minister, or some future minister, must do so. We need a serious and inclusive national conversation at a policy level about this issue in the round, and the need is urgent.


Andrew Copson is the Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association. This article was first published on politics.co.uk.

Filed Under: Comment, Education, Ethics, Politics Tagged With: Birmingham, community schools, Department for Education, Education Funding Agency, faith schools, Michael Gove, OFSTED, Religious Education, Trojan Horse

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