Category: culture wars

  • The Labour Humanists have been quite high profile at this conference and have been actively promoting their fringe meeting with A.C. Grayling on Monday. A year old, the group is mainly campaigning against faith schools. My erstwhile Doughty Street sparring partner Kris Brown is their Vice Chair and has been running around all week. This…

  • Odd last day of conference for me as I got to bookend Ming’s speech. I was in the fundraising video they showed at the start, having agreed to be a prop for Greg Stone to talk about the value of online advertising. In retrospect, it looked rather like a Children in Need appeal with a…

  • I got a response from the BBC today about my complaint regarding Jonathan Sacks’ programme on Rosh Hashanah a couple of weeks ago in which he lauded a Jewish school which had a multi-faith intake while, off-camera, doing everything he can to prevent faith schools from having to have a minimum intake of pupils of…

  • The Phantom Laurence points me to this excellent article by Francis Beckett about faith schools. In a weird cosmic juxtaposition last night (which, were I of lesser intelligence I might attribute to a Higher Power), after watching Munich on DVD I found myself watching the tail end of Jonathan Sacks’ BBC programme about Rosh Hashanah.…

  • A jokey blog post of mine on Friday about a dog with two noses, questioning whether it counted as “intelligent design” resulted in the furious response “Are you planning to purge the Lib Dems of Christians?” This rather extreme reaction is remarkably common. An article posted on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website yesterday by…