Equality Bill

My Lords, I want to widen the debate somewhat, because it touches the very roots of democracy in society. It has been a fundamental principle of the democratic state, certainly over the last 100 years, that independent corporations within the state have a freedom and enjoy a freedom. Churches and faith groups are independent corporations. Their life does not spring from the state, but from within their own communities. Freedom, for them, means the right for their members to follow the rules of their faith, provided it does not offend decency or public order. Even in a different age, less democratic, more intolerant than our present age, this principle was observed. In 1795, the narrow Protestant Parliament of Ireland gave £8,000 to the Catholic Church to build the seminary at Maynooth. The English state, when the Union of Parliaments occurred, continued with this grant, which rose to about £26,000 a year, a lot of money in the early 19th century. The Bill alters all this and we are in grave danger of using the ideology of equality to question the demands that faith communities make on their pastors and followers. Traditionally, faith schools—the essence of faith in many cases: the Roman Catholic Church almost bankrupted itself to create its schools—demanded that their staff followed the practices of the faith that the school represented. This was certainly the case when I was briefly in charge of a parish in the early 1960s, when teachers in local schools were expected to respect the faith that the school represented and on which the faith had spent large sums of money. The Bill seems to me to restrict this right to employ members of their creed and those who practise their moral code only to those who are pastors, priests or teach doctrine. I think it ought to extend to many more people, particularly teachers in schools, and not be restricted to that narrow area. I return where I began: that hard-fought right of independent corporations to express themselves is an important element of what we mean by freedom in the state. Dictators always restricted these rights of churches, trades unions and more, and this, in a funny way, is what we are doing at the moment in the interests of ideology. In France, savage anticlerical legislation was passed in 1905. The result was 50 years of conflict—fifty years in which charitable activities were restricted—and we see a faint sign of how that could occur with us in what has happened to the Catholic Children’s Society. It is a paradox that in the early 19th century the narrow, intolerant Protestant minority was prepared to build a Catholic seminary and that our generation, which is supposedly generous and understanding, is actually restricting the rights of church bodies and inaugurating conflict that can only do harm. I beg noble Lords to support the amendment.