Baroness Warsi – good on immigration, crap on religion

I admired Baroness Warsi’s performance on Question Time. She spoke reasonably and rationally on the question of immigration and got some very good points in. I had a look at her website as a result and read her Conservative Party Conference speech. In a way, I wish I hadn’t, as it contains some really pathetic self-pitying material on ‘faith’:

Conference, under Labour, the State has become increasingly sceptical of an individual’s religious belief…  We’ve all seen the stories…  How appalling that in Labour’s Britain, a community nurse can be suspended for offering to pray for a patient’s recovery.  Or a school receptionist could face disciplinary action for sending an email to friends asking them to pray for her daughter  At the heart of these cases lies a growing intolerance and illiberal attitude towards those who believe in God. The scepticism of senior Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris driving this secular agenda… has now grown to become an ideology permeating through many parts of the public sector…  It’s an agenda…  driven by the political-elite,  who have hijacked the pursuit of ‘equality’  by demanding a dumbing down of faith.  It’s no wonder that this leads to accusations in the media that our Country’s Christian culture is being downgraded.  For many their faith brings them closer to their neighbour, it’s the driver for their voluntary work, their social action.   This scepticism against faith communities and in some case outright hostility,  is both wrong and dangerous…

According to Warsi, the State is ‘sceptical’ about ‘faith’, there is ‘growing intolerance’ towards religious believers, there is a secular ‘ideology’ and an ‘agenda’ being promoted by a ‘political elite’, and this is ‘dangerous’.

I beg your pardon?!

Aside from the few Daily Mail-esque examples of ‘intolerance’ cited by Warsi (incidentally, if I’m in hospital, I certainly DO NOT want to be asked if I would like a nurse to pray for me!), she provides no evidence to back up her hyperbole. Why? Because it doesn’t exist. In fact, she’s talking rubbish.

In August of this year, Prime Minister Gordon Brown (very much part of the ‘political elite’) was interviewed by Premier Christian Radio. Brown stated:

I think the role of religion and faith in what people sometimes call the public square is incredibly important.

In Britain we are not a secular state as France is, or some other countries. It’s true that the role of official institutions changes from time to time, but I would submit that the values that all of us think important – if you held a survey around the country of what people thought was important, what it is they really believed in, these would come back to Judeo-Christian values, and the values that underpin all the faiths that diverse groups in our society feel part of.

And on ‘privatising’ faith (i.e. keeping religious rhetoric out of the public arena), he said:

I think it’s impossible because when we talk about faith, we are talking about what people believe in, we are talking about the values that underpin what they do, we are talking about the convictions that they have about how you can make for a better society.

So I don’t accept this idea of privatisation – I think what people want to do is to make their views current.

There is a moral sense that people have, perhaps 50 years ago the rules were more detailed and intrusive, perhaps now what we’re talking about is boundaries, beyond which people should not go.

And I think that’s where it’s important that we have the views of all religions and all faiths, and it’s important particularly that we’re clear about what kind of society we want to be.

Brown is also a Prime Minister who has happily appeared on Songs of Praise and spoken of his ‘Presbyterian conscience’.

Looking at Islam, Warsi’s own religion, Muslims are in no place to complain that the State somehow discriminates against their faith. Figures for the allocation of public money by the Government in the period 2007-2008 show that hundreds of thousands of taxpayer pounds were given to a wide variety of Muslim-based initiatives.

Then there’s funding and support for interfaith initiatives. We have, for example, ‘Faiths in Action‘:

The Government has announced a new funding programme to support collaborative work between faith groups. Communities and Local Government promoted the new Faiths in Action fund at the launch of ‘Face to Face and Side by Side’ in Westminster.

Faiths in Action is a £4 million grants programme open to faith, inter faith, voluntary and community sector organisations at national, regional and local levels in England. Grants of up to £12,000 are now available in round one, to be spent over two years from April 2009 to the end of March 2011.

And next month we will see a national ‘Inter Faith Week‘ which ‘is being facilitated by the Inter Faith Network for the UK and the Department for Communities and Local Government’. Here’s what Hazel Blears has to say about it:

I’m encouraging faith groups and communities to reach out to each other during ‘Inter Faith Week’ and local authorities, schools, and others to host and encourage inter faith events. England’s first-ever ‘Inter Faith Week’ can provide a wonderful focus for increasing understanding between people and help to shape the new economy that we build together.

The truth of the matter is that, contrary to the whining of various ‘faith groups’ and their representatives, in Britain today religion receives more sympathetic coverage and ‘respect’ than it has done for many years.

Baroness Warsi’s drivel about a secularist conspiracy is vapid nonsense at best, and ideologically motivated at worst. Either way, please Baroness, give it a rest. Give us more of what you said on Question Time, and less about ‘faith’.