Category Archives: Op-eds

Several issues have placed religion and it’s role in politics in the spotlight this week.

Labour has found itself in hot water over allowing a free vote on the bill that will allow the creation hybrid human-animal embryos. Meanwhile, across the pond, Barack Obama is assessing the damage done to his campaign by the comments of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. The Pope’s baptised an Italian born Muslim convert as part of his Easter message in what was a somewhat ill-advised piece of showmanship. Here on Liberal Democrat Voice we have had quite a lively debate around faith schools.

First, let’s set some parameters for the debate.

Religious faith, or lack of it, is a matter of personal conviction – but the business of government is to govern an entire society comprised of different levels and types of individual belief. Modern, democratic states must be secular (not atheist) in nature. This is especially true in the age of the ‘war on terror’, when fundamentalist ideologues try and portray secularism as merely a covert tool of Christian domination.

Secularism is a cornerstone of moder democracy, it is a founding principle of democratic nations and direct and principled break from a past in which rulers claimed legitimacy from divine inheritance. It is more than just a fancy word, it must be at the heart of democracy because it is the principle of the predominance of the people’s will over patronage allegedly handed on down from the heavens.

It is not essential to have religious faith to share a set of moral values or indeed to ‘belong’; it is easier and far more healthy to unite around human centered values in beliefs, such as belief in the innate capacity of humanity to better itself. More often than not, religion does more to divide than unite, as we are seeing day-after-day in the world at large.

It coheres a specific ‘group identity’ but part of that process is unity against the other groups. Saying religion is a unifying force is a bit like saying a love of football unites a nation – try telling that to a room full of Tottenham and Arsenal or Manchester United and Manchester City fans.

Lord Goldsmith would like schoolchildren to swear an oath of allegiance to better define our sense of Britishness. Poor unfortunate children are to be made to swear the oath to Queen and country (presumably); one wonders if the new ‘citizens’ will get a certificate or baseball cap to celebrate their inclusion. This is the worse example that could be possibly imagined of a bungled attempt to impose values of tolerance on people from above; the very result of which is the fostering of the intolerance and bigotry which the measures are supposed to stymie.

Firstly, many will object to swearing an oath of allegiance to the Queen or the institution of the monarchy. In a democratic society it is increasingly an anachronism and I think it should be noted that nations which have formed their identity in the process of democratic rebellions against monarchical rule (like the United States and France) already have days to celebrate citizenship such as the ones now being proposed. However, those days are a celebration of the achievements of the people. It is a worthwhile point that it seems a little unfair to ask a Catholic to swear allegiance to a throne that anybody sharing their religion would be prohibited from sitting on; the notion that the monarchy embodies ‘Britishness’ is to view it from the perspective of a visiting tourist.

Often in politics, as in life, we are faced with choices we simply don’t want to make; for whatever reason none of the options on offer seem to offer what we really want. Such a choice faced both the Liberal Democrat leaders and the eventual rebels in the recent vote on the question of whether there would be a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. As we know, the vote resulted in the biggest Liberal Democrat rebellion in history and resignation of three front bench spokesmen.

Were the rebels right to defy the three-line whip and vote with the Conservatives? The answer …

I recently applied to join the Liberal Democrats; something that represents something of a political full-circle for me. During the 1992 General Election my Primary School held a mock election and I was part of the team that led the Lib Dems to a resounding victory. After that my political activism drew me into the Labour Party (I was there on that night in ’97) and then leftwards and, finally, after resigning from the Labour Party for a second time over the invasion of Iraq, out of active politics altogether.

Nick Clegg’s recent statement on Britain becoming a ‘Prozac nation’ is what drew me back to the Lib Dems; to me it showed willingness to tackle an issue that politicians rarely tackle, and, if they do, rarely with bold and innovative insight. Also, Barack Obama’s campaign for the Presidential nomination has revitalised my belief in progressive politics. His attempt to build a true progressive coalition between traditional core progressives and disaffected, ‘small-c’ conservatives is something that I believe can be emulated in the United Kingdom, and it is something that I believe the Liberal Democrats are best placed to do.