Education (Non-religious Philosophical Convictions) Bill [HL]

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 3rd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to take part in this debate and I am grateful to the noble Baroness for giving us this opportunity to do so now. I say also, with an extraterritorial hint, how appropriate it is to be debating this while there are schoolchildren present in the Public Gallery. That adds lustre to the whole occasion.

I have opted to speak in this debate largely because, first, such progress was made the last time an attempt was made, and it was just time that was lacking. This attempt to resurrect what has already been before us is therefore welcome. Secondly, since the Commission on Religious Education produced its report in 2018, it seems sad that the Government have not felt that it was timely yet to respond—although, as the noble Baroness has properly said, in Wales there were no such constraints. The matter has been on the statute book for some time and I cannot think, coming as I do from nonconformist Christian Wales, that anything has imploded yet. We are moving in the right direction.

Perhaps I may express a potentially conflictual interest: I was once president of the Methodist Conference, and therefore a national religious leader. That ought to be brought into play as people estimate and evaluate what my intervention is all about.

I wholeheartedly approve of this very clear and logical Bill. I hope that it gets the kind of support that it deserves. For too long, we have pussyfooted around on this and I hope we can be clear in our judgment today. However, I do not want it to be thought that this is a mere defensive ploy on my part: namely, that because we have enjoyed privileges and suchlike in the past, and recognising that things are in decline now, we want to make the most of that—to manage the decline, if you like—or that we will make such concessions as we have to, to slow the process down as much as we can. In case anybody thinks so, that is not my motivation at all.

Let me remind those who have a read a book or two of a statement that was made in 1644. “I cannot praise”, said the author,

“a … cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”

That is from the Areopagitica, written by John Milton, in 1644. I bring that into my remarks to say that it is about time that we Christians put our faith out into the marketplace, where it can hold its own or not according to the interplay of forces and realities that exist in the real world that we live in. I relish the thought of being a Christian in such a world where openness, transparency and fearlessness exist.

I wanted to make it clear that, although a religious leader, I speak at this moment for myself—I might have some interesting exchanges on the floor of the annual Methodist Conference about this, and I will be happy enough about that—and it was for that reason that I quoted John Milton, not just for the quotation but because he was a great humanist. Six years before the Areopagitica, he went on a European tour as a young man, with the sole objective of meeting all the humanist thinkers in Europe. He started in Paris and went off to Italy—Sicily, Rome, Florence and Venice. He met Galileo in Florence and was lionised by Europe; I wish there were more British people lionised by Europe in our day. For all that, he was a humanist because Christianity itself should understand that, beyond the faith it adheres to, which gives Christians their sense of values, lies a common human cause to which everybody belongs and aspires to represent.

It is in that sense that I have joined the British Humanist Association because, like others in that association, I believe that the flourishing of humanity is what we all aim at. If I may therefore express just a tiny regret in closing: I long to see the British Humanist Association move from defining itself as anti-religious to being a force for good with others who collaborate, whether they are religious or not, in building a better world for our children and our children’s children.