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Blair: discrimination fine, as long as it's based on belief

13:00 / 11.05.03

Blair gives religious employers the right to sack gay workers

Tony Blair was accused of caving in to evangelical Christians last night after it emerged that new government legislation will allow faith schools, churches, hospices and other religious employers to sack lesbian and gay staff.

Equal rights campaigners were furious when they discovered that regulations intended to combat discrimin- ation in the workplace contain wide-ranging exemptions for any employer "with an ethos based on religion or belief"...

...Other major changes to the original draft, allowing discrimination against atheists or others who do not share the religious beliefs of their employer, were made following strong lobbying from evangelical groups. One of the biggest loopholes allows an employer to dismiss or fail to hire an individual if he is "not satisfied" that they fit his own "ethos based on religion or belief".

Critics claim that this would allow firms such as Stagecoach, run by Scottish evangelist Brian Souter, or Vardy, the North-east car dealership owned by millionaire Christian Peter Vardy, to discriminate freely.

What's eating at me is, what's the point of him introducing this? The religious right is utterly irrelevant in British politics. Does this mean he actually believes that faith justifies whatever discrimination you see fit? You realise that, for all the sneers about right-Christian American politicians, it's now looking like the British PM is a nutter too. Faith schools were bad enough.

The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement said that the move would institutionalise homophobia in a way that "makes Section 28 look like a tea party".

Can't argue with that one.

14:25 / 11.05.03

Fucker.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

15:01 / 11.05.03

Maybe he's hung around with Bush so much that he wants to build back up the religious right so they can try and mess things up as much as they do in the States?

16:23 / 11.05.03

Does it work both ways? Can I hypothetically sack Christians from my gay-friendly, pro-secular workplace? And what about non-religious 'beliefs': can i get sacked, say, for believing that capitalism is a Bad Thing? As of right now I don't understand this legislation at all.

16:26 / 11.05.03

You realise that, for all the sneers about right-Christian American politicians, it's now looking like the British PM is a nutter too.

word is, he's gonna convert to Catholicism when he's done with being PM - he is quite seriously religious, it seems, albeit not in the way Dubbya is.

18:00 / 11.05.03

Before I engage in full-on outrage, I'd want to know what this legislation is supposed to do. I mean, I won't get too upset if the point is to avoid making church appointments illegal on the grounds that no atheists are shortlisted for the priesthood. (The question of female or gay ministers is more interesting, however.)

Also, I find it hard to believe that even Blair could introduce a bill that would allow stagecoach to discriminate in the way described above. Besides, wouldn't that clash with the Eurpean convention on human rights, which is british law IIRC. Still, the article claims that *any* employer potentially has exemptions. Anyone got any more info?

22:00 / 11.05.03

Can I hypothetically sack Christians from my gay-friendly, pro-secular workplace? And what about non-religious 'beliefs': can i get sacked, say, for believing that capitalism is a Bad Thing?

It seems to be worded in favour of pre-existing "belief systems"; I don't think politics would get you there, though you might be able to argue about atheism I suppose.

Tryphena Absent

22:13 / 11.05.03

Can we get rid of the fascist and have the Tories back now? I think I prefer the outright bastards to the fanatical idiot, he's getting worse and worse, totally makes my skin crawl.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

08:04 / 12.05.03

Well, this certainly seems to be Blair's 'Clause 28'.

09:37 / 12.05.03

Can we get rid of the fascist and have the Tories back now? I think I prefer the outright bastards to the fanatical idiot, he's getting worse and worse, totally makes my skin crawl.

You know, I find myself thinking the same thing upon occasion, which makes my head spin.

Anger and outright disbelief are my two reactions to this. I can see no good purpose to this legislation - even if it is designed to stop Lurid's 'no atheists are shortlisted for the priesthood' kinda thing it will only be used against any minority in a workplace. I mean, how broad is 'belief'?

Hopefully the Lords will gut it when it gets to them. I can't believe I find myself hoping more and more that the House of Lords will 'do the right thing' with mad bad Govt. bills that come their way. I suppose it's their revenge for Blair axing most of them.

11:04 / 12.05.03

I have been trying to get my head round what I have read about these exemptions and I can't. I understand some of the exemptions in other anti-discrimination legislation, such as the concept of "genuine occupational qualification" the Race Relations Act and the Sex Discrimination Act. Sometimes the race or sex of the employee is integral to the service being provided by the employer: a director making a film about, say, India can insist on Asian actors, or a women's prison can (probably must) employ a woman to carry out intimate examinations. These sort of exemptions make sense - they are not going against the general thrust of the anti-discrimination but are recognising that in some limited circumstances race or gender have a genuine bearing on what the worker is employed to do. The proposed exemptions for religious employers seem to be saying little more than that it is okay for certain employers to carry on discriminating in exactly the manner that the proposed legislation is seeking to combat. Not an exemption but a get-out-of-jail card.

11:39 / 12.05.03

this whole thing is quite bizarre.

I mean, why? what are they trying to prove?

I don't recall ever seeing any Christians going around demanding their right to sack gay people - are they going for the (rather limited, I hope) fundamentalist bigot vote, or are there just some people in the government with a slightly weird and scary religious agenda or what?

11:41 / 12.05.03

I don't think TB has ever made any bones about his religious beliefs - in fact he might well have converted to Catholicism already, certainly he attends RC services; but that's not really the important point, as Roman Catholicism is hardly the same as the religious right in America (indeed I suspect that many members of the religious right in America regard the Church or Rome in much the same light as the Whore of Babylon). It does sound from this as though he's adopted some of the techniques of the American religious right... I wonder, incidentally, how much this has to do with the insidious introduction of private financing into the education system? I am reminded of the schools in the North-East which were built under PFI (in fact they may even have been part-funded by Vardy - I can't remember the name of the businessman involved but he is certainly a fundamentalist, evangelical Christian) under an agreement in which the private partner puts forward some of the initial cost, and subsequently maintains control over the governing body of the school despite the fact that ongoing costs are supported by the public. The schools in question teach 'Creation Science' etc. and have heads of departments who are quite open about their preference for this over Darwinian evolution (so much for the National Curriculum - for these schools only, apparently). I believe one of these places is now a 'Beacon of Excellence' or whatever dodgy term they are now using... One wonders whether TB is trying to protect this sort of school from the onerous task of having to apply equal employment legislation when appointing teachers; and this would seem to be a symptom of creeping privatisation of the education sector.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

12:12 / 12.05.03

I don't know whether there's any 'dark motive' as such or whether this is just New Labour trying to be all things to all people. Consider the faffing about they've done on the fox-hunting issue.