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

March 21, 2017 by Jay Harman

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.

MP claims Christians are ‘fearful’… but Church of England research shows the opposite is true

December 5, 2016 by Guest author

Alexander von Koskull reports on how Christian fundamentalists face an inconvenient evidence gap when suggesting that Christians are scared to express their faith in modern Britain.

A street preacher on Buchanan Street, Glasgow. Photo: mot/Flickr

Last week, Conservative MP Fiona Bruce attracted a lot of media coverage after making the claim in the House of Commons that Christians ‘are worried, or even fearful, about mentioning their faith in public.’ Even the Prime Minister sympathised with her statement, intimating that religious liberty could indeed be under threat in Britain, much as Bruce alleges.

But the research to back up Fiona Bruce’s claims isn’t there. Or rather, there is research commissioned by the Church of England on the attitudes of practicing Christians, but it actually suggests the opposite: that Christians do in fact feel comfortable talking about their faith openly.

Bruce is a patron of the Conservative Christian Fellowship, and her comments during Prime Minister’s Questions were intended to echo a report from think tank ResPublica which called for legal amendments that would require employers to accommodate religious beliefs of employees, which it can only do by asserting that such a thing is not already the case, or that there is some kind of public outcry worth responding to. The Church of England’s survey clearly shows there isn’t, and that Bruce’s views do not represent the Christian community as a whole.

In the Study of Practising Christians in England, respondents were asked to record their level of agreement with statements on their practice of faith and relationship to god. The results found that:

71% of respondents agreed with the statement – ‘I feel comfortable talking to non-Christians about Jesus Christ’.
65% disagreed with the statement – ‘I am afraid of causing offence when I talk to non-Christians about Jesus-Christ’.
73% disagreed with the statement – ‘I almost always feel unable to take up opportunities which present themselves to me to talk to non-Christians about Jesus Christ’.
76% agreed with the statement – ‘Talking to non-Christians about Jesus Christ is an act of evangelism’.
Finally, 66% recalled that they had talked about ‘their relationship with Jesus Christ with someone who was not Christian’ in the last month, half of which did so in the last week.

The calls to review the human rights law in relation to religion and belief have also been called into question by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which argued that changing the law so that employers are explicitly required to ‘reasonably accommodate’ employees would be superfluous and would even require employers to privilege the rights of religious people to discriminate against others. The British Humanist Association embraced the EHRC’s findings and welcomes the surmounting evidence which refutes claims that Christians are fearful about expressing their faith in public under current legislation.

It is hard not to see such false claims of victimisation as a small thread in the fabric of Christian groups lobbying for greater autonomy to discriminate against others on religious grounds. They’ve been calling in recent months, both in the UK and other countries, for greater freedom to discriminate in the workplace, schools, and elsewhere.

What the Church of England’s data shows however is that no consensus even exists among Christians that their right to exercise a religion is under threat – and surely that’s because it isn’t, as the recent ECHR report found.

Changes to equality laws are not only unnecessary, but are likely to undermine the existing equal protection of people in the workplace by favouring people with certain religious beliefs over members of the LGBT community, women, and even people of other religions.

If anything, the law should be changed to limit discrimination, particularly in schools. But there is precious little sign of movement in that direction. The Government is currently planning to change the rules so that schools in England can discriminate by religion in 100% of places, with potentially very damaging results for community cohesion and fair access to local schools.

Uncertainty, democracy, and the role of reason

November 14, 2016 by Liam Whitton

This editorial originally appeared in the British Humanist Association’s ebulletin, a weekly briefing to BHA members and supporters covering the latest news, views, videos, events relating to Humanism in the UK. Sign up for the ebulletin to receive the BHA’s briefing each week.

It didn’t start in America and it didn’t start with the election of Donald Trump. For months pundits have discussed the phenomenon of ‘post-truth politics’: politics deliberately based on simplification, appealing to the raw emotions of the electorate. Evidence, historical precedent, well-reasoned analyses: all count for nothing. In fact they are repudiated as being the preserve of elites.

This populism replacing reasoned politics is now global and a major threat to universal human rights, to secularism, to reason, and to humanist values.

In India, Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government disparages the open secular framework that has long held the most diverse nation in the world in some sort of social harmony. In Poland, the Government is preparing once again for an aggressive assault on the rights of women, justified entirely through appeals to Catholic dogma. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte indulges in sermon-like attacks on atheists, interwoven with rabble-rousing cries to bring back the death penalty. And in Russia, Putin, re-elected President in 2012, has used aggressive foreign policy to settle domestic political issues while imprisoning those who offend the church or criticise his regime. In Turkey, we see one of the greatest tragedies of our age: a country full of cosmopolitan potential transformed into a police state under Erdoğan, without democracy and without a free press or judiciary. In Hungary, the rule of law is rapidly becoming history. Elections in the next few months threaten the rise of far-right authoritarian parties in Austria, France, and the Netherlands.

When the world is so very far from what we want it to be, there is a temptation to retreat, to tend to one’s own garden and look to the private and the domestic. These are, after all, areas of our lives where we at least have some sort of control, and where we can have some positive effect.

This isn’t entirely the wrong instinct. Just as peace between nations starts with love between people and happiness in societies, our little choices can affect the bigger picture. So much of the BHA’s work is directed to the lives of individuals: our school volunteers encourage young people to open their minds and their sympathies, our pastoral carers give like-minded support to those in personal crises, and our celebrants guide families and couples through some of the highest and lowest points in their lives.

But public crises call for our public involvement, not just private actions.

As humanists, we champion secularism because we believe everyone is treated better when governments and churches are kept apart. We champion human rights not simply because we believe in the equal dignity of every living person, but because we know that this is something all-too easily forgotten by humankind. And we steadfastly champion democracy and the rule of law, along with those civil values that ensure their smooth functioning.

In all that we do, these social values are our guides, along with reason, empathy, and kindness. The future is uncertain and ever-harder to predict. But we must enter it optimistically, rationally, and with a cool head on our shoulders. Our humanist way of thinking has given the world so much over the centuries and its resources are far from depleted. We are entering a dark chapter in the human story, but the light has burned brightly in darker times than this. Today we all have a responsibility to tend the flame.

Offended? That’s the price of freedom.

November 4, 2016 by Andrew Copson

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.

Opinion: The humanist case for staying in the EU

June 20, 2016 by Joan Smith

This blog is part of a series of perspectives on the EU referendum from prominent humanists on either side of the debate. Each puts forward a humanist case for the United Kingdom either remaining a member of, or leaving, the European Union. All six perspectives are linked in the image below.

Joan Smith: The humanist case for staying in the EU

Ideas know no boundaries. For at least two-and-a-half thousand years, Europe has been the testing ground of ideas about who we are, why we are here and the best way to live. From Greek philosophers to French anti-theists and the English and Scots thinkers who played a key role in the Enlightenment, European thinkers have driven forward the march of progressive ideas. They’ve done it against a tragic background of internecine warfare, pitting neighbours against each other in some of the most terrible conflicts to disfigure the planet.

Against the odds, the EU has persuaded huge numbers of people to focus on what unites us rather than old divisions – just look at all the individuals and institutions outside the UK pleading with us to stay. As I write, we are part of a community of more than 500 million people living in countries with a commitment to shared values and universal human rights. Those values are vital to humanists, creating a legal framework in which we are protected from age-old demands from religious and other extremists who would like to impose their beliefs on people who don’t share them.

I love living in a European community where my right not to have a religion is protected by law. I love the fact that no member state of the EU can use barbaric punishments like the death penalty. I love the fact that equality is at the heart of the European ideal, challenging centuries of bigotry (much of it sanctioned by church and state) towards women, the disabled and LGBT people. Of course individual countries could do this on their own but it’s easier – and our hard-won rights are easier to protect – when we are part of a larger whole.

I am proud of what Europe has become since the Second World War. I don’t think for one moment that it has destroyed the nasty side of human nature, and I have watched the rise of xenophobic forms of nationalism in some European countries with horror. But I think we are stronger when our political leaders recognise that they are part of project based on universal values and respect, drawing strength from each other. That is more important for me than the economic arguments, which are in any case a no-brainer.

I live in a continent influenced by Plato, Galileo, Voltaire, Simone de Beauvoir, people with inventive minds who shaped what it means to be modern. As a humanist, I don’t want to return to the petty nationalisms and squabbles which have torn Europeans apart so many times in the past. The EU isn’t perfect but I want to remain part of a community with a commitment to equality that’s made the lives of so many people immeasurably better.

Opinion: Religious skeptics should be EU skeptics

June 20, 2016 by Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley: Religious skeptics should be EU skeptics

My biggest reason for voting leave this month is the European Union’s democratic deficit and bureaucratic surplus, which makes it an ill-suited organization for bringing prosperity and peace in the evolving and emergent global world we increasingly inhabit. It’s too top-down in philosophy, and too parochial in mindset. My euro-scepticism is dead in line with my religious skepticism, though you certainly don’t have to be an unbeliever to vote leave: I don’t like being told what to do by a priestly class.

‘My euro-scepticism is dead in line
with my religious skepticism, though you certainly don’t have to be an unbeliever
to vote leave: I don’t like being told
what to do by a priestly class.’

There is a certain similarity between the way fans of the European Union talk about Brussels and the way believers talk about the Almighty. Benevolent, omniscient, and remote, the European Commission sees far into our hearts and knows exactly when we need to be told through a directive not to buy something, not to make something, not to build something. It’s currently trying to tell us not to vape, for instance, at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry which has a nice little earner in prescription nicotine replacement, even though it is now clear that vaping is massive life-saver.

The entire basis of the EU is that leaders know best. It was set up by people horrified by what demagogues had done in the twentieth century, and were determined to put technocrats in charge instead, and insulate them from the democratic winds. It’s a stretch to call this religious, but the parallels with the papacy in its pomp are all too clear.

In Britain we nurtured a very different tradition, broke with Rome, killed a king who thought he had a divine right to rule and gradually absorbed the message of the enlightenment that the world is not run by great men, let alone deities, but is changed by ordinary people through trade, innovation, habit, and fashion. More than any other European country we resisted the urge to worship a leader and lend him (never her) the power to tell us what to do.

It is in that tradition that the current movement to leave the European Union should be seen. We do not like the imposition of a single currency, with the acute pain it has caused to many people, just as a way of forging a united polity. We do not like the fact that more than half our laws originate in the European commission and are justiciable by the European court, neither of whom is answerable to the people. We do not trust priesthoods and never have.

In the 1950s, when central planning was in its heyday, when we in Britain also still lived under a thicket of rules about what we could eat, buy or do, it was no surprise that the fore-runner of the EU began as a centralized, top-down, dirigiste bureaucracy. That was the way of the future then, before the collapse of living standards in Russia, China, and more recently Venezuela shows just where central planning’s faults lay.

In the 1970s, it just about made sense for Britain to join this regional bloc, which was at least partly dominated by the highly liberalized and free-market German philosophy of Werner Ehrhard. But now, in an era of cheap container shipping, free Skype intercontinental phone calls, budget airlines, rock-bottom World Trade Organisation standards, and global trading rules negotiated industry by industry at the global level, the regional focus of the European Union is an irrelevance and an anachronism. It perpetually tries to dictate rules for consumers and citizens within one continent, ignoring the wider world where we all trade.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the tech sector and the digital industry. Europe has not manage to negotiate a trade deal with America despite years of trying, yet that does not stop you or me buying software and hardware from the big American digital firms all the time. The EU has a dismal track record in creating digital start-ups, throttling them at birth with petty rules, so that we have not one to compare with Apple, Google, Facebook or Amazon. (One of our best candidates, Spotify, is threatening to leave the EU for America.)

The parallel with Humanism is pretty obvious. Humanism means suspicion of superstition, but is also means respect for human beings’ wishes. People have voted for a digital world with great enthusiasm over the past few decades by buying digital products, joining digital networks and embracing egalitarian values. Into this world lumbers a bunch of highly paid, lowly taxed, richly fed Eurocrats, who never saw this coming, saying things like “we must have a minimum of boring French films on Netflix” or we insist that hyperlinks respect intellectual property, or whatever the latest wheeze big companies have breathed into their ears over a four-course meal in Brussels.

In the sixteenth century, admittedly for carnal reasons, the English got a chance to tell a wealthy and parasitic priestly class, answerable to nobody and with a top-down view of the world, to get stuffed. We have the same chance again today.

Matt Ridley is a journalist and Conservative Party peer who is a member of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group. He is also a patron of Conservative Humanists.

Opinion: The EU is an invaluable venture in pooling sovereignty in a shrinking world

June 20, 2016 by David Pollock

David Pollock: The EU is an invaluable venture in pooling sovereignty in a shrinking world

The referendum campaign is immensely depressing for many reasons. For one, the two sides are merely shouting at each other, not engaging. For another, when all the best qualified institutions and experts agree that leaving the EU would be economically damaging, the Brexiteers respond only by invoking a corrosive and irrational distrust of experts, emulating the worst ways of conspiracy theorists. Moreover, their ramshackle coalition of rackety discontents from across the political spectrum cannot agree on any alternative economic policy, flinging out as many unformulated ideas as they have ways of spending the cash putatively saved by quitting. On the other side the Remain campaign has so far failed to respond to people’s worries about immigration: indeed, they are now reaping the whirlwind many of them had previously sown in their distorted and one-sided presentation of immigrants as scroungers and health tourists.

Sadly the EU has for decades been subject to a campaign of systematic distortion and lies in the proprietor-owned press. Even the BBC, in the interest of balance, is now presenting a distorted picture, reporting equally the lies of the Brexiteers (‘£350 million a week for the NHS’) and the sober warnings of the Institute of Fiscal Studies.

The issues are far too important to be so demeaned. The EU is an invaluable venture in pooling sovereignty in a shrinking world. So far from representing a surrender, it offers Britain, with its mature democracy and pragmatic politics, a platform for wider international influence. It is undoubtedly imperfect (as in our own sphere the history of the European Humanist Federation’s engagement under Article 17 of the Lisbon Treaty shows) but in its espoused principles and standards (and devices such as its Ombudsman who in that case found for the EHF over the Commission) it contains the mechanisms for self-correction.

Indeed, the EU offers great promise for the future: it deserves commitment, not sabotage. The hated Brussels bureaucrats are the servants of the Council of Ministers, doing the will of governments and subject to their control. Just as our own Parliament had to fight over centuries for its powers, so the European Parliament is demanding – and gaining – more influence and powers. Already EU regulations – collaboratively adopted by all EU members – are improving our own standards in (for example) workers’ rights and environmental protection, providing a collaborative bulwark against big business’s devotion to short-term profit that individual nations are increasingly powerless to resist. It is the EU that is standing up to US-based multinationals over taxation, privacy and monopoly power. The EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights and the associated agency are valuable backing for the Council of Europe’s Convention on Human Rights. Its freedom of movement may bring low-paid eastern European migrants here – largely to do jobs that no-one else will take – but it is a huge benefit for those who remember queues and delays at endless national frontiers and a necessary corollary of the freedom of trade that boosts business efficiency and the prosperity of us all.

The EU was a great promoter of human rights and rule of law in eastern Europe, setting standards that candidate member states had to meet and maintain. The narrow nationalism of the Brexiteers, however, lends comfort to their confrères in unsavoury populist parties such as are now in power in Poland and Hungary and their even more dubious allies in neo-fascist and similar parties in France, Austria, Germany and elsewhere. These also play on anti-EU nationalism and atavistic appeals to past greatness. The way to resist such dangerous trends – and they are genuinely dangerous – is not to pander to them by walking away and so weakening the democratic forces in the EU: it is to stand up to them and engage in the argument, advancing cooperative internationalism rather than putting up the shutters and ushering in another age of unconstrained nationalistic rivalries. As so often, it is hard work, not extravagant gestures, that are needed.

No human institution is without fault, and the EU is obviously no exception, but it is a strong force for good and well worth defending in this referendum campaign and then reforming from the inside rather than petulantly quitting and pouring scorn on it powerlessly from afar.

Opinion: Lead a more democratic Europe from outside the EU

June 20, 2016 by Kelvin Hopkins

Kelvin Hopkins: Lead a more democratic Europe from outside the EU

The European Union is anti-democratic, anti-socialist, and failing economically. With low and negative economic growth, 25% unemployment and 50% youth unemployment in some member states, living standards cut by a quarter in Greece, forced privatisations and restrictions on collective bargaining rights as conditions of bailouts, the true nature of the EU is now plain to see.

Free movement of labour is designed simply to reduce wages and reduce wage bargaining strength. The Laval and Viking Line cases where the European Court ruled in favour of employers and against trade unions made a nonsense of the supposed EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and were a clear indication of the direction of travel being steered by the EU’s masters. Raising up the market and market forces against elective democracy was evident from the start in its original name, the Common Market, and was opposed at the time by British socialists including Hugh Gaitskell, Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan.

In a Commons debate in 1989, Tony Benn MP said, ‘I was brought up to believe, and I still believe, that when people vote in an election they must be entitled to know that the party for which they vote, if it has a majority, will be able to enact laws under which they will be governed. That is no longer true. Any party elected, whether it is the Conservative party or the Labour party can no longer say to the electorate, “Vote for me and if I have a majority I shall pass that law,” because if that law is contrary to Common Market law, British judges will apply Community law.’

Labour’s policies of public ownership such as returning the railways to the public sector will not be possible if EU free-market rules are applied. The franchising of Britain’s railway operations as supposed ‘privatisation’ is especially bizarre when Deutsche Bahn, the German state railway owns much of Britain’s public transport services, with British passengers effectively subsidising Berlin commuters.

The recent EU Fourth Railway package will soon be forcing continental EU state railways into the same mould as that in Britain.

Some people of faith say that membership of the EU is primarily a matter of values not economics. I say that does not cut much ice if you have no home, if you have no job, or if the government is forced to close down or sell off public services at the behest of the European Central Bank. The reality is that the EU is an arm of neo-liberal capitalism which is and has failed across the world and which even the IMF has now concluded. By remaining in the EU the UK will find itself dragged down in a sinking vessel.

The European Union project moved slowly and by stealth at first, later accelerating following the 1980s Single European Act. It was clearly intended to promote the dismantling over time of the post-war social democratic structures which brought such massive benefits to millions of working people across Western Europe.

The current secretive negotiations to impose TTIP, the proposed EU/USA trade deal which would give massive power to the giant private corporations to be able to prosecute democratically elected member state governments is conclusive proof – if further proof were needed – about the true nature of the EU.

It is time for democratic member state governments once again to stand up for their peoples and to reject the EU. The United Kingdom has an opportunity to take the lead in that process by voting ‘Leave’ in the coming referendum.

That being said, I always emphasise that the European Union is not Europe. The European Union is simply a political construct covering many of the countries of Europe. Europe is a sub-continent of great peoples, beautiful countries and superb culture. Democracy, socialism and trade unionism were all created in Europe. We can have a great Europe without the EU, a Europe of international friendship and solidarity which will not sell out working people to the global corporations. Britain can lead the way to that different Europe as other countries in the EU see the advantages of independence and a renaissance of democracy.

Opinion: Reject Europe’s claims of a Christian identity, reject the EU

June 20, 2016 by Crispin Blunt

Crispin Blunt: Reject Europe’s claims of a Christian identity, reject the EU

Today we find ourselves locked in much deeper integration with Europe than was presented to the British people when they endorsed our membership in the 1975 referendum. European judges can overwrite British law and direct our legal regulations. Those many aspects of the acquis subject to QMV leave our own government and Parliament frequently and controversially overridden by the competing interests of our partners and even more frequently our government’s position quietly compromised to achieve unanimity.

The truth is the geo-politics of our island and its history means the British position on Europe is hopelessly compromised. The integration required to make this great idealistic project work is disguised from the British people, because they don’t really get it.

For British humanists, the debate over Turkish accession is instructive. It brings out, not least from our central European partners, talk of Europe’s Christian identity. That a large Muslim country would be an unacceptable departure from this. Just at the moment it seems polls indicate we are now formally a majority nation of non-believers we are being asked to check back in for a particular ethnic religious identity within the EU. The UK’s situation reflects our global internationalist outlook, where all religions, and now mostly none, all rub along relatively happily together. In the same way our multi-ethnic population reflects that global cultural and historic legacy. That’s what makes the European project so much more conflicted for the UK.

The central European response to the prospect of Turkish accession doesn’t sit easily with us. The UK is formally still a strong supporter of Turkish accession. That reflects our much more relaxed view of religion and identity and the strategic need to secure Turkey within the European sphere of influence. But the practical consequences today of our economically marginal citizens being competed out of work and the prospect of progress in their own country by professionally qualified east Europeans would be made dramatically worse by Turkish accession. Their plight is going to become even more marked when the living wage kicks in by the end of this Parliament, whether or not Turkey accedes.

Our own society’s cohesion and stability should be of interest to humanists. With formal control of immigration we may just about sustain the pressures of global migration patterns. The challenges that will inevitably bring, difficult outside the EU but much more so inside, would at least produce politicians who can be directly held to account if we are outside the EU. Britain has produced a society with a very global outlook, and perhaps as a consequence it’s no surprise organised religion is now a distinctly minority sport. I believe we are best able to protect this outside the EU, but with the rights of all our minorities and identities still sustained by the wholly different treaty base of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The UK is a problem for the EU. Our lack of commitment to the institutions is being paid by our partners and us on security. Outside the EU we can and would continue to cooperate on security issues much as we do now. Inside the EU we actively prevent our partners achieving the kind of integration required to make the EU a really effective security and defence player in the world. It is absolutely in our interest that the EU sharing our values, becomes a more effective partner.

26 of our partners are either Euro or pre-Euro countries. They must move towards some kind of United States of Europe or the Euro area will collapse. An accountable body will have to vote the common tax and benefits across Europe to support the common currency area. Unsurprisingly many of our partners also want a common defence capability, which makes complete sense if your interests are so closely aligned that it’s bizarre that you should not defend them together.

And it’s us, the UK that actively seeks to prevent this. It’s toxic to promote this in the British body politic because most of us Britons are simply not checked in for the European ideal and are not prepared to make the sovereignty sacrifices involved. It’s why this kind of narrative has been completely missing from the Remain campaign.

We have the luxury of the option of a perfectly sustainable global role outside the EU, rather more attuned to our people, economic strengths, history and culture. We should take it and help our partners resolve their need for further political and security integration rather than obstruct them.

Our obfuscation on Islamism misses the mark and stigmatises all Muslims

November 19, 2015 by Guest author

In the wake of the tragic events in Paris last week, Jacob Kishere appeals for an honest and plain-speaking language when describing the dangers posed by religious fundamentalists.

Jean Jullien’s Eiffel tower peace symbol, which went viral on the Internet as a show of solidarity to the victims of the atrocity in Paris.

Before the bloodshed had even ended in Paris on Friday night fingers were already pointed; it is the perpetual blame game and all too familiar to the one seen 10 months prior in the wake of Charlie Hebdo. Since the spirit of unity was channelled worldwide in the hashtag #jesuischarlie, there has been an inadequacy in our political discourse on both sides which continually fails to address the threats we face.

Given the context of rising anti-Muslim bigotry, many on the left – who anticipate further backlashes – have called for calm, repeating the mantra that the jihadist epidemic has ‘nothing to do with Islam’. Meanwhile, increasingly enraged by the left’s perceived obfuscation on matters relating to Islam, figures on the right have adopted the position that Muslim populations are complicit in these atrocities, and proclaims these terror attacks the bloody result of failed multiculturalism. The consequences of both mutually inflammatory positions have been an increasingly toxic atmosphere in civil society toward Muslims and abject failure to stem the rising tide of radicalisation.

But if we are to do any justice to the victims of these countless ideologically driven attacks, the very least we can do is recognise that there is an ideology at play. That ideology is Islamism. Both left and right must recognise this in order to move forward. Well-intentioned leftists must end their blind defence of all things Islam and recognise that the ideology of Islamism has something to do with Islam. While it may be instinctive to the traditions of academic left to attribute jihadist action to western foreign policy and prevailing conditions of social desperation, neither the data nor our experiences support such reasoning.

As early as the 9/11 attacks we saw the propensity for wealthy, educated individuals to commit atrocities in the name of ideology, with many of the conspirators holding graduate level degrees. Bin Laden himself was the heir to one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia. Far more revealing in his case is that he was tutored by Muhammad Qutb, brother of Sayed Qutb the ‘grandfather of Islamism’. For decades, funded by Saudi oil money and facilitated by Western governments favouring the most reactionary voices within communities as ‘leaders’, Islamist ideology has been directly imported into European communities. At present, Western Europe is reaping the seeds it has allowed to be sown by Islamists for 20 years in its communities through universities and other institutions. If anyone doubted the degree of the crises they need only consider the militants fighting in Syria from France numbering 1,200, from Belgium numbering 440, from Germany numbering between 500–600, and from the UK numbering around 600 (See International centre for the study of radicalisation and political violence, KCL) with many considering these estimates to be conservative.

At the same time, pundits on the political right must recognise that it is not Islam – the faith of billions – which drives jihadism in the west so much Islamism: the fundamentalist desire to impose any form of Islam over society.

It is often stated, and yet not enough, that the first victims of this ideology in any act of jihad are Muslims themselves. This is self-evident throughout the Arab World, and was again demonstrated brutally in the bloody Islamic State attacks in Lebanon which claimed the lives of around 43, just hours before violence erupted in Paris. Reactionaries must recognise that what they are witnessing is not a battle between a vaguely defined ‘West’ and the religion of Islam but a battle within Islam between that religion’s progressive reformers and its militant hardliners. It is only through empowering and working with the progressive reformist voices within communities that they will effectively counter Islamism. In the coming weeks, the straw man of refugees as a causal factor will inevitably be thrown up; but this too is a fiction. Those arriving on the shores of Europe are fleeing the very threat we now face at home.

Growing up in a post-9/11 Britain, I heard many times the repugnant sentiments that ‘not every Muslim is a terrorist, but every terrorist is a Muslim’. But as much as the left reviles such casual bigotry, it is very much the unintended consequence of the left’s language of obfuscation. Whole generation of Britons lack the vocabulary – the conceptual tools required — to properly articulate the nature of this threat they so fear. And if we as a society are to come together and address this common threat, we would be far better served in remembering this: not every Islamist is a jihadist, but every jihadist is an Islamist.

Jacob Kishere is a humanist and a student of history. He blogs on Medium at @JacobKishere.