Relationships and Sex Education

Debate between Ivan Lewis and Shabana Mahmood

Monday 25th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Shabana Mahmood]

My right hon. Friend has been attempting to reconcile conflicting interest groups in his constituency, as he will discuss later. He is right that most cases in our constituencies have arisen in academy schools, for which there is nowhere to go other than the Secretary of State. If those schools were within the family of Birmingham local authority schools, we could at least come together in a joint process that respects and gives voice to religious backgrounds—not just moderate, reform or progressive religious communities, but orthodox ones. We could negotiate a settlement that does justice by all parties, allows all our valued, loved and respected communities to be included in that process and enables our children to have the confidence to move forward in modern 21st-century Britain. That is what all the parents who have come to see me in the last few weeks want and why they wanted me to be in the debate.

[Mr Ivan Lewis]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Shabana Mahmood]

No, because I wish to give other hon. Members time to make their speeches.

It has been a real problem for parents to get a fair hearing about genuinely held religious conviction in an atmosphere that sometimes does not feel tolerant of religious beliefs. Most of those parents absolutely sign up to the equalities agenda. Particularly in the Muslim community in Birmingham, Ladywood, we recognise that our status as a minority community demands that we stand up for the rights of other minority communities.

It has to be possible to reconcile the differing perspectives on life of different minority communities. I consider it a failure of politics that we find ourselves in entrenched, polarised and divisive debates, where the rights of people are set against one another. We in Parliament—the representatives of the people—have not done our collective job to reconcile those rights. Instead, we have left it to schools. In Birmingham in some instances, that has left us in a total mess, which is not acceptable.

Some of what has been done in Birmingham is not part of an early roll-out of relationships education for primary school pupils, but action under the Equality Act 2010, as my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North mentioned. The Equality Act sets out several protected characteristics. Nobody disagrees with the protection of those characteristics, but it is a fact of our modern politics—the culture war that we are all living through—that those protected characteristics conflict with one another in some cases. For example, there is no point talking about biological sex and gender identity with children, because the adults of our country cannot decide what the exact relationship between the two is. Those two protected characteristics are clearly in contested territory.

Who decides how we navigate that contested territory and draw a line that does justice by competing groups? It must be Parliament; it cannot simply be left to teachers or state officials acting in other capacities, such as in prisons or schools. There has to be a negotiated settlement led by the Government with input from every part of Parliament. There must be an acceptance that, in a diverse society, we must pitch at negotiated settlements between different groups in which most people can come to a compromise, because they are the greatest thing that we have to offer.

In the absence of anybody willing to play that role, I do not blame parents for saying that they want to opt their kids out, because the subject has become so divisive and polarising that they cannot see another way out. Without any arbitration mechanism or protection for those of us at the unfashionable end of the faith spectrum, in orthodox religious communities—I am an orthodox Muslim—whenever there is a conflict about rights, everybody feels it is okay to ride roughshod over orthodox communities and push them to one side.

I do not believe the Government have the right to legislate for the calling of an individual’s conscience. I ask the Minister to take that point away. Unless he can come up with a system that ensures fairness between competing rights, he must give way and allow a right to withdraw.