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

Lord Addington Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 3rd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is one of those debates where you sit here and think, “What am I going to say?” Then there is the further problem of seeing that the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, is in front of you on the speakers’ list, and you know he is going to come in with something important. When he speaks in favour of what I can only describe as muscular Christianity, backs it up with Milton and says bring it on, it would be fairly churlish to go far from that line.

My noble friend’s Bill would help clarify this situation. If we ignore the spiritual elements of religion—described as superstition or something else—and consider it as a guide to how you live your life now, humanism fits in with that very well. There might be more of a problem with other worldviews, but they are all there. You could not teach humanism without knowing about the other religions, for the simple reason that—the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, got there first and said this earlier—many of them feed off each other. At their philosophical centre, they are all in agreement. When reading up on anything about religion, the thing that gets me is the number of times that they all agree with each other. We may fight wars about whether you pray on a certain day or in a certain way, but basically most of the philosophical actions are in agreement. So I hope that we can go along with the general thrust of what my noble friend is proposing in her Bill.

As the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, said, the Library briefing made it very clear that there is a direction of travel. My noble friend is not paddling upstream on this issue; we are already going that way. It might be possible to work this into the rest of the syllabus at the moment, but if it is not exact and clear, as the noble Lord, Lord Davies, pointed out, you will always get diversity.

Surely we require of people an understanding of what goes on around them, as understanding what other people think makes tolerance easier because you are less frightened of them. That is one of the primary directives of the Bill. Allowing somebody to understand that, if somebody disagrees with you, they are not, by definition, evil is probably the best we can hope for from this. If we look back to the various historical points when that has not happened, certainly from the 16th century onwards, and at the number of deaths, plots and prejudicial laws that have been based on that lack of understanding, we see that it is quite mind-boggling. If noble Lords ever wanted to feel guilty about something, look at history: all nations can drown in their own sins, if they have been playing at all.

I hope that this small change and the direction of travel in the Bill—if not this one then another, because Private Members’ Bills have a habit of getting chewed up by the system—will be embraced by the Government and future Governments. It is clearly where many people want to go. We can argue about statistics and whether you come from a Christian or non-religious background—you can do that for ever—but the fact is that there is a growing diversity of faith and philosophy in this country that dominates the way that people react and change. If we do not admit to that, we are fooling ourselves. If we do not make sure that people are taught from the earliest age how they can take that onboard, we are missing a trick and probably making all our lives more difficult.

I hope that the Minister, when she replies, will be able to tell us how that will be done and what the future guidance will be. I have a little sympathy with her, as I know that everybody wants their particular pet horse put into the curriculum, but this is one change we could make.

I look forward to what the Minister, and indeed the Opposition Front Bench, has to say, so that we can get an idea of how their thinking is going, because if we are not going to take this on board, this is not going away, and I would like to know how we are going to achieve the aims of the Bill, or at least some acceptance of them.