Martin Parsons: Coastguard plan hits choppy localism waters

By Martin Parsons

On Thursday Labour Shadow Transport Secretary Maria Eagle made the extraordinary claim that the planned coastguard station closures were the result of the coalition cutting the transport budget “too far and too fast”.  I say ‘extraordinary’ because what the government is proposing is a somewhat scaled back version of a closure plan that was drawn up by the last Labour government of which Miss Eagle was a minister. In fact, I exposed part of that plan on Conservative Home – the closure of at least one of the main coastguard stations on the East Coast - more than two months before the general election.

Faced with a shadow Transport Secretary who apparently does not even know what her own party’s policy was when they were in government little over a year ago, it would seem that Philip Hammond and his team have little to worry about!

What should perhaps concern Mr Hammond more is the relationship between his department’s decision making and the government’s localism agenda. The responses to the government’s consultation on the coastguard closure plan were overwhelmingly against closure, with a particular fear that the local knowledge and expertise coastguard officers have would over time be lost if regional Maritime Rescue and Coordination Centres were replaced by more nationally based ones.

Martin Parsons: Why I will NOT be joining the teachers' strike on Thursday

By Martin Parsons

1. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) has become politicised. When I first qualified as a teacher, I joined the union that is now known as ATL. I joined it for exactly the same reason that most teachers join a union - they want someone to back them up if a student makes a malicious allegation against them. I joined ATL specifically because it was a union that was not politicised and did not take strike action over pay.  When I returned from working overseas a few years ago and rejoined ATL I was shocked to discover that the political neutrality that had been such a hallmark had gone out of the window.

When the union had been led by Peter Smith, although himself a Labour Party member, he had very carefully steered it away from political involvement to just looking after teachers' interests. Not so, I discovered with Dr Mary Bousted as General Secretary. I found the union had joined the TUC – although what tangible benefit that brought teachers is far from clear. More significantly, it was also issuing political statements on behalf of its members - although neither I, nor, I suspect, thousands of other ATL members, were ever directly consulted. These included statements opposing not only academies but also faith schools – even though more than a quarter of ATL members actually worked in voluntary-aided and voluntary-controlled schools. In other words, an ideological political agenda was being prioritised in at least some areas over the interests of teachers.

2. The NASUWT are not striking on Thursday. Whenever there has been a teachers’ strike in the past, the two unions that have generally called their members out on strike have been the NUT and the NASUWT. ATL has never carried out a strike in its 147-year history. It will therefore seem to many teachers extremely odd, if not disconcerting, that Dr Bousted persuaded ATL to hold a strike ballot when the NASUWT was not proposing strike action.

Martin Parsons: What sort of war are we fighting in Afghanistan?

By Martin Parsons

Unless this question is clearly answered first, we will be in danger of lacking clear war aims (which appears to be the case) and appropriate political and military strategies to achieve them, and still less will we be able to bookmark on the calendar any particular dates for the end of our involvement in hostilities.

Broadly speaking, in the last century there have been two sorts of war Britain has been involved in:

1. Wars that have the potential to be ended by negotiation. Arguably, the First World War fell into this category. In fact, some historians have suggested that had a world statesman of the calibre of former Conservative Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister Lord Salisbury been around, then the war itself might have been avoided.
2. However, there are other wars where the intentions of the enemy are such that the only safe outcome for us is either a) a holding operation that neutralises the enemy in at least the short term by containing them (something that arguably we are currently doing with the Taliban and other Islamist terrorist groups in Afghanistan); or b) in the longer term total military and political defeat of the enemy. This was the case in World War Two where Nazi ideology led to genocide, and attempts to impose Nazi rule and ideology on the rest of Europe and elsewhere meant that there was no safe alternative but to continue the war until the Nazis were totally removed from power.

I have argued before that one cannot negotiate with the Taliban or with other Islamist terrorist groups in Afghanistan such as Hezb-i-Islami. I speak from personal experience: as an aid worker in Afghanistan ,I had to negotiate with senior members of both organisations.

Martin Parsons: Post bin Laden - Which way will Pakistan slide in the fight against Islamist terrorism?

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”, so wrote Mark Twain to the New York Journal after the newspaper had published his obituary. The same is very much true in relation to the Taliban and other expressions of violent Islamism. Osama bin Laden’s death will not signal its end. In fact one of the key issues that governments on both sides of the Atlantic should now be  on is whether the death of bin Laden will impede or exacerbate Pakistan’s slide towards radical Islamism?

The simple fact is that the events of the last few days have the potential to make Pakistan even more unstable.

The problem goes back to both the nature and the extent of the influence that the military has had over successive Pakistani governments since independence. While in some Muslim majority countries, such as Turkey, the military has historically acted as the guardian of a secular state, in Pakistan the military has played a very different role by deliberately sponsoring Islamism.

The reason for this is that within the Pakistani army there is an endemic belief that main role of the Pakistani government is to protect the country against India. In the eyes of the army particularly, this takes precedence over what other countries would see as the normal functions of government, such as maintaining the institutions of a functioning democracy, law and order, education and development etc., i.e. what is sometimes called ‘nation building’. 

Martin Parsons: Should immigration be biased towards those most likely to integrate?

By Martin Parsons

In this week’s speech on immigration David Cameron raised an issue which seems to have escaped the headline writers. This was a subtle, though highly important shift in government attitude towards culture.

Whilst clearly emphasising how much ‘good immigration’ had contributed to Britain, Mr Cameron also made it clear that there were broad, though distinct limits to the level of cultural diversity the government is prepared to tolerate. In particular, he emphasised that certain ‘cultural practices’ were simply beyond the pale:

"For a start there are forced marriages taking place in our country, and overseas, as a means of gaining entry to the UK. This is the practice where some young British girls are bullied and threatened into marrying someone they don't want to. I've got no time for those who say this is a culturally relative issue - frankly it is wrong, full stop, and we've got to stamp it out."

Which he followed by:

"There are other problems with what's called the family route. We know, for instance, that some marriages take place when the spouse is very young, and has little or no grasp of English. Again I don't believe we should allow cultural sensitivity to stop us from acting…So however sensitive or difficult a subject it may be, we are tightening up the family route."

Mr Cameron is of course absolutely right and chimes in with what many ordinary British people have intuitively thought for a long time about so called ‘cultural practices’ such as forced marriages.

However, what is hugely significant is that by emphatically describing such cultural practices as ‘wrong’ and needing to be stamped out David Cameron has signalled a a subtle, but nonethess incredibly important and long overdue shift in government attitude towards culture.

Martin Parsons: Human rights are more important than democracy in Islamic countries

As David Cameron today becomes the first western leader to visit post Mubarak Egypt, Paul Goodman has highlighted some important questions the visit raises about what British foreign policy in the region should be. Are we pro-democracy in the region, or not? If we are, what does that imply for our relationship with allies that aren't democracies, such as Jordan and Morocco (let alone Saudi Arabia)?

Any approach to the current crises in the Middle East must recognise that since the 1970s the overall trend in most Islamic countries has been towards greater islamisation, rather than towards greater liberalisation.

As such the primary need of such countries is not for democracy, but for basic human rights to be guaranteed. Without this emphasis the advent of democratic reforms are likely to be used by well organised Islamist groups to speed up the Islamisation process, which will itself severely restrict basic human rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, academic freedom and fair and equal treatment for all by the law.

In the period between the end of the second world war the oil crisis of the 1970s there was generally speaking a period of liberalisation in Islamic countries. Many newly independent countries were seeking to ‘modernise’ and although Islamic law (shari'a) was still at least informally applied at a local level, western style systems of law were becoming dominant. The constitutions of newly independent Muslim majority countries were typically based on secular law, although sometimes retaining a special status for certain aspects of shari'a.

However, since the 1970s there has been a reversal of this trend, with increasing attempts to apply and enforce shari'a instead. This has led to serious restrictions on basic human rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion and academic freedom.

Martin Parsons: We have a problem if ordinary people cannot afford to become an MP or peer

By Martin Parsons

Five years ago the Conservative Party began a phase of consciously trying to change its image to reach out to a wider section of the electorate. It was important not just electorally, but also as a reaffirmation of what Conservatism has since the days of Disraeli stood for. Yet I believe that there is another further and more crucial step that we must take to modernise the image of the party in terms of inclusiveness and being in politics for the good of everyone in Britain.

When I talk to teenagers about politics one of the most common reactions I hear about the Conservative Party is summed up a 15 year old girl who said to me:

‘Conservatives – aren’t they just for posh people?’

If we are honest, most of us in our hearts know that the biggest image problem we have is the perception of many people that we are a party for the comfortably off, or at lest for those who aspire to be comfortably off. That is an image that we fundamentally have to change if we are to win the next election.

Now oddly enough it is the MPs' expenses issue that may give us the opportunity to do this.

The question that we need to raise in public debate is this. How many ordinary people could afford to become either an MP or a member of the House of Lords? If this answer is ‘not many’ then we have a problem with our democracy.

Martin Parsons: The new Government needs to take urgent steps to counter sharia-based radicalisation

Martin Parsons concludes his three-part series considering how to counter radical Islamism. Part II was yesterday.

In the previous two articles (here and here) I have outlined how attitudes to sharia are the most important touchstone in defining radicalisation. Sharia is the boundary line that defines most clearly the difference between on the one hand, ordinary British Muslims who follow a traditional, devotional form of their faith and who contribute much to our British way of life and on the other hand, extremists who pose a serious threat to our historic British values and the freedoms they give us.

In 2007 research conducted by Policy Exchange revealed that 37% of British Muslims aged 16-24 said they would prefer to live under sharia than under British law, while a similar number of Muslims under 35 said they agreed with the sharia stipulation that anyone who converted from Islam to another faith should be executed.

These findings not only clearly illustrate that attitudes to sharia are a key touchstone in defining radicalisation among British Muslims, they also point to a demographic time bomb in this respect. Previous estimates of the number of British Muslims who had been radicalised generally suggested between 13% and 15%. However, Policy Exchange’s research suggests that more than a third of Muslims aged under 35 have been radicalised. It is therefore essential that the new Government takes action both to undo the appeasement of the sharia agenda that took place under the previous Labour government and to  challenge young British Muslims that advocacy of sharia is a line that must not be crossed.

To counter the growing sharia based radicalisation I would recommend that the government considers at least the following steps:

Martin Parsons: Sharia is the touchstone for recognising and combatting radical Islam

Martn Parsons writes the second in a three-part series considering how to counter radical Islamism. Read Part I.

Yesterday I outlined how the previous Labour government’s approach to countering Islamism failed to recognise that the violent and non-violent Islamist groups had, at least in broad terms, the same long-term strategic aims – the introduction of sharia to Britain and elsewhere in the world. The previous government’s partial appeasement of the agenda of non-violent Islamist groups actually led to ground being surrendered towards the alignment of certain aspects of British law with sharia.

Today I want to address another related issue which the previous government entirely failed to get to grips with – how to identify radicalisation among British Muslims. In particular. I want to suggest that each individual Muslim's attitude to sharia is the touchstone for identifying radicalisation.

One of the major problems any government faces in identifying and combating radicalisation is separating ordinary British Muslims from radicals. The thorny issue here is that ordinary British Muslims, who are deeply peace-loving, have a primarily devotional faith. However, they are largely unaware that the Islamic theological schools (madrassas) that train imans follow a theological curriculum that has remained largely unchanged for 400 years and has very similar teaching to radical Islamism concerning the imposition of Islamic law and government on non-Muslims.

This is not simply the Saudi (Hanbali school of Islamic law) curriculum identified in a recent BBC Panorama programme. It also includes the Hanafi school of Islamic law, whose Dars-i-Nizami curriculum is used by most Sunni madrassas in the Indian subcontinent and those with subcontinent links in the UK. This contains a major textbook on sharia known as the Hedaya.

However, the widespread ignorance of the contents of this among many ordinary British Muslims, who follow a traditional, primarily devotional form of Islam, means that there is actually a spectrum of belief among British Muslims. The essential problem for the government is to find a way of defining a specific point that very clearly delineates the start of radicalisation and that can be used as a touchstone to assesses when British Muslims and Islamic organisations have crossed it.

Martin Parsons: Stopping the spread of sharia is central to countering radicalisation

Martin Parsons begins a three-part series considering how to counter radical islamism.

“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat” warned the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu reputed author of The Art of War.

Unless we understand the ultimate aims that Islamist terrorists are seeking to achieve, then every public policy aimed at countering them will be no more than tactics, with little hope of strategic success.

Fundamentally, the ultimate aim of Islamist terrorists is that Islamic law (sharia), which is the primary instrument of Islamic government, should be imposed across the entire world on Muslim and non Muslim alike.

However, even the most cursory look at the previous government’s policies for countering violent Islamism suggests that they lacked this basic understanding of Islamist aims. This ignorance, whether wilful or otherwise, not merely delayed effective advance against Islamism, but in some respects led to tactics that actually gave specific ground to Islamists in terms of achieving their long term aims in Britain and overseas. In particular, the previous Labour government pursued a policy of partially appeasing non violent Islamist groups in the misguided belief that this would prevent radicalised Muslims moving onto violent Islamism.

In doing so they ignored the clear evidence that non-violent Islamist groups have the same ultimate long term aims as violent Islamists – the imposition of sharia in Britain and elsewhere. In broad terms it is not their strategic aims that differ, but merely their tactics. Non-violent Islamists have long recognised that Britain is unlikely to become an Islamic state overnight, so they have concentrated on pursuing a gradual Islamisation process.

This strategy has involved seeking to align British law gradually with sharia. They have done this by a combination of pushing test cases through the courts; by lobbying for specific changes to parliamentary law; by seeking various accommodations towards Islamic practices from public bodies; and by looking for legal loopholes such as the use of arbitration tribunals to create sharia courts deciding cases involving family law and even reputedly some criminal cases.

Martin Parsons: What next in the Conservative Party's relationship with Churchgoers?

This is the final part of a five-part series looking at the Conservative Party's relationship with churchgoers after thirteen years of Labour government. Dr Martin Parsons is a regular contributor to CentreRight.

In the previous four parts of this series (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4) we have looked at how prior to the general election a great many practising Christians were becoming deeply disillusioned with Labour as a result of the government’s sustained attack on historic British liberties such as freedom of belief and the right to express it.

We have also seen how it was Conservative peers who alone of the three main parties had stood up against this assault on Britain’s historic Christian liberties. With between 3 and 4 million practising Christians who were deeply concerned about this issue there was the potential for this to significantly affect the outcome of the general election. This was the equivalent of more than 4,500 voters per constituency. If only 1,000 of those 4,500 voters had switched from voting Labour (or Lib Dem in Lib Dem held seats) to voting Conservative, then we would have gained an overall majority.

However, in the actual election period a number of factors led to much of this potential vote dissipating. In part 4 we examined these, which included a lack of any specific encouragement to Christian voters that on the issues that most concerned them, the Conservatives would treat them fairly, or at least more fairly than Labour had done. There were also instances that more specifically led to a degree of alienation of Christian voters from the Party. Most prominent of these were the party’s reaction to Chris Grayling’s comments that Christians offering bed and breakfast in their own homes should be allowed to set ‘house rules’ as to who shared a double room, while those offerring accommodation outside of their personal homes should be required to make it indiscriminately available to all.

These comments were initially greeted with a huge sigh of relief by many Christians, that at last someone was trying to be fair to both Christians and gay people. But there was predictably a huge sense of disappointment when Chris Grayling was forced to retract them; This sense was heightened by the deselection of a parliamentary candidate by the Scottish Conservative Party because the candidate’s website stated that whilst he would always treat gay people equally, he couldn’t personally endorse homosexual practices. This action by the Scottish Party created a strong impression among many Christians that the Conservative Party was intolerant of Christians and prepared to actively discriminate against anyone holding orthodox Christian beliefs on sexual ethics to the extent that they would prevent any such person from becoming a Conservative MP.

Martin Parsons: Did we alienate Christian voters at the election?

This is the fourth of a five part series looking at the Conservative Party's relationship with churchgoers after thirteen years of Labour government. Dr Martin Parsons is a regular contributor to CentreRight.

In Part 1 we examined Labour’s sustained attack on Christian liberties in Britain and in part 2 the how the Conservative opposition in the Lords had led the defence of Britain’s historic heritage freedom of belief and the right to express it. We also observed that a very large number of practising Christians who had not recently vote Conservative had become profoundly disillusioned with the Labour government. In part 3 examined how large and how potentially significant this move away from Labour among practising Christians was. Today we consider whether the Conservative Party alienated Christians at the general election.

In 1997 the Conservative Party lost its majority in a landslide to Labour, a situation which, despite the colossal unpopularity of the last Labour government, we have not yet managed to reverse. A year after that defeat William Hague reflected that:

‘Millions of people who share our values and our principles felt they could not support the Conservative Party with their votes. We need to reconnect with those people, to persuade them that we share their hopes and their concerns for the future of our country.’

Among those ‘millions’ who felt disillusioned with us in 1997 were many active Christians, people who were socially conservative. They not only intuitively believed in that thing called ‘society’, but were some of the most active participants in it, not just in nice middle class areas, but in the difficult inner city areas, where they continue to make a major contribution to repairing Britain’s broken society.

During the last decade of the Thatcher/Major governments many Christians felt (wrongly) that Conservatives were uncaring, some even began publicly to question whether it was possible to be a Christian and a Conservative. Tony Blair openly played on this during the 1997 election campaign attempting to identify Labour with moral and Christian values and quite wrongly implied that Labour was the only party that Christians could vote for.

The end result was that millions of people including what was almost certainly at least hundreds of thousands of committed Christians who had previously voted Conservative switched to voting Labour.

Why many Christians started to look to the Conservative Party again - but many didn't vote for us in the end

This is the fourth of a five part series looking at the Conservative Party's relationship with churchgoers after thirteen years of Labour government. Dr Martin Parsons is a regular contributor to CentreRight.

In Part 1 we examined Labour’s sustained attack on Christian liberties in Britain and in part 2 the how the Conservative opposition in the Lords had led the defence of Britain’s historic heritage freedom of belief and the right to express it. We also observed that a very large number of practising Christians who had not recently vote Conservative had become profoundly disillusioned with the Labour government. In part 3 examined how large and how potentially significant this move away from Labour among practising Christians was. Today we consider whether the Conservative Party alienated Christians at the general election.

Martin Parsons: The scale of the Christian voting community

This is the third of a five part series looking at the Conservative Party's relationship with churchgoers after thirteen years of Labour government. Dr Martin Parsons is a regular contributor to CentreRight.

In Part 1 we examined Labour’s sustained attack on Christian liberties in Britain and in part 2 the how the Conservative opposition in the Lords had led the defence of Britain’s historic heritage freedom of belief and the right to express it. We also observed that a very large number of practising Christians who had not recently vote Conservative had become profoundly disillusioned with the Labour government. In part 3 we will try to examine how large and how potentially significant this move away from Labour among practising Christians was.

In the 2001 census 71.7% of the British population chose to identify themselves as ‘Christian’ compared to 15.5% who identified themselves as ‘no religion’. . However, nominal adherence does not normally affect voting patterns. However, for those for whom Christianity is an important part of their lives it may well do, and at a time when – as we saw in part 1 – many Christians have been deeply concerned at the Labour government’s attack on freedoms long enjoyed by Christians and others in the Britain – the it is quite likely to affect how they vote. Whilst there have been many surveys by individual denominations of church attendance on a particular Sunday, it is more helpful to look at surveys based on sampling across denominations and across the year.

A recent surveyof this type indicated that there were approximately 7.6 million people who attend church at least monthly – that’s 15% of the UK population. Not all of these will necessarily have their voting patterns directly affected by religious issues. However, the issues I have outlined above were a particularly pressing issue for practising Catholics and Evangelicals – which at a very conservative estimate would be about a million evangelicals (which is the actual membership of the Evangelical Alliance – although they claim to represent a constituency of around two million) and around 2.1 million practising Catholics i.e. between three and four million plus people.

Remember William Hague’s observation in 1998 that:

‘Millions of people who share our values and our principles felt they could not support the Conservative Party with their votes.’ – people who the Conservative Party needed to reconnect with and ‘persuade them that we share their hopes and their concerns for the future of our country’?

Those included many practising Christians.

By early 2010 for a great many committed Christians, far from Labour being the only party that Christians could vote for as Tony Blair had tried to persuade people in 1997, Labour had by now become the anti Christian party. This was something that potentially could have had at least as big an impact on the 2010 election result as the move of disillusioned Christians towards Tony Blair’s New Labour had in creating the Labour landslide of 1997. Let me illustrate:

A couple of years ago a man who was head of RE in a Catholic school said to me ‘like most Catholics I’ve always voted Labour, but with what the government is doing I’m having to reconsider’. He was one of many that were for the first time considering voting for us, whose votes the Conservative Party should have won – but we didn’t. There are as approximately 2.1 million practising Catholics like this man who attend church at least monthly and many more regularly. It was not just Catholic voters, although as a group that had largely tended to vote Labour in the past they could potentially have made a very significant difference in some of the marginal constituencies we needed to win to gain an overall majority.

It was also Evangelicals, of whom there are estimated to be 2 million regular churchgoers. Even just taking the actual membership figure for the Evangelical Alliance – of one million, that equates to more than 1500 people in each constituency. Unlike Catholics, Evangelicals have in the past largely divided their votes on a similar pattern to the rest of the country. However, something was changing in the two years or so leading up to the May 2010 general election that was causing a large number of practising Christians, both Catholic and Evangelical to seriously consider voting Conservative. It was a widespread perception that Christians were being systematically discriminated against by legislation that the Labour government was pushing through.

Three years ago I attended a meeting convened by the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics in Cambridge. Among those present were around 50 leaders of highly respectable and well known Christian organisations in the UK. The feeling was expressed that Britain was ‘no longer a free country’. It was not simply the Sexual Orientation Regulations that had just been passed. It was the fact that an increasing number of people who had made measured criticism of the gay rights agenda had been subjected to lengthy police investigations as a result of a complaint of ‘homophobia’ even though it was perfectly clear from the outset that no crime whatsoever had been committed. For example, in 2005 family values campaigner Lynette Burrowes who had voiced concerns on a radio talk show over whether two gay men adopting a girl would be in the best interests of the child, was subjected to several hours of what she described as ‘intimidating’ police questioning. The previous year Cambridge University Christian Union had been reported to the police after hosting an apologetic meeting where the Dean of Sydney Cathedral put forward a traditional Biblical view on homosexuality. A number of other prominent Christians were subject to such police investigations. Essentially, the problem was that the Labour government’s police guidelines required the police to investigate not simply ‘crimes’ but any alleged ‘homophobic incident’. However well intentioned this may have been, it had the effect of empowering a small number of activists who did not believe in free speech to bully and intimidate into silence anyone who made statements they disagreed with. It was on this basis that an attempt was made by gay rights activists to have the Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow prosecuted for a sermon that he gave in church on the importance of marriage, because it was critical of the Civil Partnerships Act.

It was these sort of incidents that led Christians, who were by now abandoning any support for Labour in droves, to ask the question ‘Will the Conservatives gives us equal rights with gay people?’

We observed at the start of this article that there were between 3 and 4 million voters for whom the Labour government’s sustained attack on Christian freedom was an issue that they were deeply concerned about. Even if we take the lower of those figures, three million is the equivalent of more than 4,500 voters per constituency, while even two million concerned Christian voters is the equivalent of more than 3,000 voters per constituency. Now consider the fact that we lost 47 seats by less than 3,000 votes. Even, if we had only managed to secure the votes of only 2,000 of those 4,500 voters (less than 45%) we would still have managed to secure an overall Conservative majority with 327 seats.

In practice the potential impact was even greater than this as any Christian voters switching from Labour (or in Lib Dem held seats from the Lib Dems) would have double the impact by both reducing the Labour (or Lib Dem) majority and by increasing the Conservative vote. In other words if only 1,500 of these 4.500 practising Christians i.e. a third, switched from voting Labour (or Lib-Dem where they held the constituency) to voting Conservative – then we would have had a majority of 26 seats. Even if only 1,000 of those 4,500 (less than a quarter) switched to voting Conservative we would still won an overall majority.

One group that was particularly acutely concerned about the loss of Christian freedoms under Labour were black Christians and with 48% of Black people regularly attending church, this was clearly going to be an important issue if the Conservative Party was to achieve one of its key electoral aims of winning over large numbers of black voters, an aim that it largely failed to achieve.

> In part 4 we will look at what went wrong in the Conservative outreach to Christians.

Martin Parsons: Labour's attack on Christian liberties

This is the first of a five part series looking at the Conservative Party's relationship with churchgoers after thirteen years of Labour government. Dr Martin Parsons is a regular contributor to CentreRight.

In 1997 the Conservative Party lost its majority in a landslide to Labour, a situation which, despite the colossal unpopularity of the last Labour government, we have not yet managed to reverse. A year after that defeat William Hague reflected that:

‘Millions of people who share our values and our principles felt they could not support the Conservative Party with their votes. We need to reconnect with those people, to persuade them that we share their hopes and their concerns for the future of our country.’

Among those ‘millions’ who felt disillusioned with us in 1997 were many active Christians, people who were socially conservative. They not only intuitively believed in that thing called ‘society’, but were some of the most active participants in it, not just in nice middle class areas, but in the difficult inner city areas, where they continue to make a major contribution to repairing Britain’s broken society.

In the 2-3 years before the general election there was a significant move of practising Christians away from Labour and renewed interest in the Conservatives. However, as we will see later in this series of articles during the election itself the Conservative Party failed to seal the deal with many committed Christians.

During the election the key issue for a great many practising Christians was a widespread perception that there was increasing intolerance towards Christian beliefs and a very real, and not wholly unfounded fear that Christians were being increasingly excluded from public life.

Some may feel that is perhaps overstating the case, I would simply ask any Conservative parliamentary candidate what questions they were asked in election hustings. I can virtually guarantee that almost all of them faced at least one if not several questions on this subject during their election campaign. As to whether the perception Christians have is well grounded I would simply ask you to reflect carefully and sensitively on the examples below, which represent just a small sample of the sort of discrimination and exclusion from public life that Christians have faced as a result of legislation passed by the Labour government.

I will start with an example of someone personally known to me. This is one that has not been publicised by the media, and for that reason is all the more significant, as representative of a much larger body of people who don’t make a loud noise, hold marches and shout ‘discrimination’, but simply quietly withdraw from public life leaving society in general and their local community in particular so much the poorer. I knew Greg from the time I was a teenager, he was the sort of person who would do anything for anyone. A family man with two children, he lived on a large council estate and was a district nurse. When he became a magistrate, people said ‘that’s exactly the sort of person we need as a magistrate – someone who really understands ordinary people’s lives’. A couple of years ago I heard that Greg had quietly stepped down. The reason was that his lifestyle values were incompatible with him being on the adoption panel. It’s the sort of example you expect to hear from Stonewall about discrimination against gay people, but Greg wasn’t gay, he was a committed Christian and under legislation brought in by Labour he was required to act against his conscience by placing children for adoption with gay couples. He didn’t make a loud complaint about it, he didn’t mount a legal challenge against the decision (although one Christian magistrate did and was told that the new legislation required him to act against his conscience), Greg simply stepped down quietly – as did almost certainly many hundreds like him.

Dr Martin Parsons: Gordon Brown’s hypocrisy in condemning the Archbishop's sharia comments

Dr Martin Parsons negotiated with the Taliban and other radical Islamist groups in Afghanistan as an aid worker there and in Pakistan. He has a PhD in Islam and Christian Muslim Relations and is on the Party's candidates list. Here, he outlines ways in which the Labour government has gone too far in appeasing Muslim groups.

On Thursday Gordon Brown’s spokesman denounced Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ claim that the introduction of sharia to the UK was inevitable. However, Gordon Brown himself has been quietly seeking to appease certain aspects of the agenda of 'peaceful' Islamist groups in the UK - including what amounts to a partial implementation of sharia. 

In the 2005 general election Labour’s share of the Muslim vote collapsed from its normally rock solid 85% down to around 70%. It lost safe Labour seats to the Lib-Dems like Rochdale (5,650 maj), Hornsey and Wood Green (10,600 maj)  – not to mention losing Bethnal Green and Bow (10,000 maj) to George Galloway – and nearly lost several other Labour seats. This was partly due to a Muslim Vote card campaign run by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), a Muslim umbrella organisation whose leadership was largely taken over by Islamists as soon as it was formed. Candidates of all parties were told to sign up to a range of Islamic issues – public funding Muslim schools, changes in UK foreign policy etc the MCB told Muslims told to vote against candidates who refused to do so. The MCB claimed it could swing the vote in at least 20 constituencies – as the Muslim majority was greater than that of the sitting MP – who was almost always Labour.